Old stories & fresh starts

Tucked away in the back streets of Stockbridge, a former shop with a murky past has begun a new chapter as an award-winning home

- Natasha Radmehr

If the walls of this property in Edinburgh’s Comely Bank could talk, they would have salacious tales to tell. And perhaps, in a way, they can: all you need to do is dig around behind the plasterboard to discover two eyebrow-raising objects that wink suggestively to the flat’s former life as a so-called gentlemen’s club. “We found a Venetian mask and a whip beneath the floor,” laughs the architect David Blaikie, who was hired by owner Innes Miller to help him reimagine the building, which dates from the early 1900s. “We hid them again so that whoever does a refit in another fifty years’ time will find them.”

Miller wasn’t the first person to consider turning the commercial unit into a domestic residence, but he was the first to follow it through. In 2014, another property developer had secured planning permission to convert it into a four-bedroom dwelling, but the project was abandoned in the early stages after some initial structural changes had been made. For nearly six years it lay dormant, until Miller bought it in 2020. “It was like a building site when we first went in,” recalls Blaikie. “There was material lying around and temporary structural propping still in place. The floors had been dug out but there was no concrete, so it was just earth.”