and a garage in the street, with a wish to extend for his personal use. His brief was precise: “I wanted an attractive dwelling with three double bedrooms and a rear garden area, with the new build element providing a high-quality ‘bookend’ for the street.” The existing property essentially faced in one


direction, onto Circus Lane, and was accessed by an external staircase on the rear elevation. The entrance was at the back of the property and was completely independent of the three garages below it.


Although the client owned the garage on the


ground oor with the at aboe, it was in the middle of the row which didn’t provide Dugald with a lot of scope for design, as he recalls: “Every iteration we came up with didn’t justify the cost, and the layout didnt ow particularly well either as the upper oor had to be split into


jan/feb 2024


two. We weren’t gaining much more than what was already there.” Fortunately, the client was able to swap the middle garage for the one remaining end garage which, if planning permission was granted, would allow for the demolition of two garages and the construction of a new two-storey building which would provide the aforementioned bookend to the lane. Now that the space the architects had to work with was established – 150 square metres – Dugald knew that realistically he could achieve the three bedrooms that the client had asked for. “I approach projects with quite a pragmatic, problem-solving route to design. Here, I had very clear parameters to work within, especially physical ones, I knew I had to optimise what I could but there was no possibility of extending the site or the gable.”


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