Trinity Road Housing

Architects, Landscape and Interiors
ZONE Architects
Structural Engineers
Elliott & Co
Quantity Surveyors
CBA

Photographs
Anna Henly/Paul Zanre

Trinity Mews is a private development of five townhouses in the leafy north Edinburgh suburb of Trinity. 

The site lies at the top of a steep escarpment of the former raised beach to Wardie Bay.   It is an in-between zone with four storey Victorian tenements to the north and spacious stone villas of the Trinity Conservation Area to the south.  It was previously occupied by a large car repair garage which terminated a private lane with a couple of other houses already on it.  The garage was a poor neighbour environmentally in an area which is predominantly residential and extensive site decontamination preceded the build – this is a very brownfield site.

The Architects’ strategy was to extend the lane along the top of the slope to form a mews – a familiar type of Edinburgh street.  The houses sit on this edge, forming a retaining wall   and at four storeys, their top two floors have sweeping views over the rooftops to Wardie Bay in the Firth of Forth.

Edinburgh Architectural Association Multiple Housing Design Award 2023

Saltire Society Housing Design Award 2023.

Judges' Comments

There is a remarkable sense of ‘before’ and ‘after’ attendant with this project, ‘before’ being dwarfed in spatial terms by the ‘after’ – for what has been created, though small, nevertheless,  is a mightily positive contribution to the urban environment. By exploiting the mews typology in a contemporary fashion, two distinct and complimentary spaces are created: hard landscaped to the entry side, and soft landscaped to the garden side.

The mews townhouses though apparently uniform, externally actually offer alternative ways of living internally, allowing for the occupier to inhabit at their discretion, according to their needs.  An undeniable plus made from an unenviable negative.

Address

211 Granton Road, 
Edinburgh EH5 1HD

Website - Form by Thought

© ZONE Architects 2017. All rights reserved.
This website and its contents are the copyright of ZONE Architects. 
You may not, except with our express written permission, distribute
or commercially exploit the content. You may not transmit it or store
it in any other website or other form of electronic retrieval system.