Office/studio 
- Edinburgh

Contractor
Bankton Building Services
Structural Engineers
Elliott & Co.
Photos
Chris Humphreys

ZONE Architects designed and developed this studio building themselves in 2007 in order to provide an excellent work environment. The site is a steep embankment formed when the broad sweep of Granton Road was laid out in the nineteenth century. The building demonstrates how a left over scrap of land can be turned into a valuable resource as well as being an exemplar work space.

A key issue related to developing this site was understanding the orientation, sun path, and potential impact on neighbours to the north.

The building houses a large studio with sea views on the ground floor with ancillary meeting rooms and a workshop on the floor below, cut into the embankment. Its long south facing street wall helps to differentiate the edges of public pavement from private garden. A shift or slip in the building forms the entrance, and a long easterly window/garden access allow unexpected views and light through. It aims to create an environment somewhere between an artist’s studio and a workshop.

The material language of the studio recalls both the industrial and the domestic, and it is in the resonance between the two that the studio construction is developed: low tech timber frame construction often used in dwellings; brick work walls used in garden and workshop situations, unusual in Edinburgh but relating to the character of the Lower Granton Road terraced cottages and other buildings in the area which are being redeveloped (Old Wireworks, Lighthouse); high quality and durable zinc cladding reminiscent of industrial mass production and repetition, yet lightweight and reflective.

Crisply detailed eaves and glazing/openings are intended to have a quality of the functional/utilitarian. The significant earth engineering of retaining wall and external platforms allows the building to be rooted/embedded/slid into the ground, as if already, layers of tides or silt or cultivation/use had accumulated.

Address

211 Granton Road, 
Edinburgh EH5 1HD

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