The house

It’s a good stone-built Edinburgh house, at the western end of a terrace of four built around 1880. Being end of terrace (the story goes that the architect who built the terrace kept this one for himself) we have windows at front (NW), side (SW) and back (SE) - great for gaining light, but great also for losing heat. Two cupolas also bring light and let out heat through the top of the house. One lights the stairs that lead from ground to first floors; the other brings light into the bathroom on the first floor. Both in fact ‘borrow’ light from the roof space above the first floor, to where it is fed through two sloping glass skylights in the flat roof above. We’ll talk about the roof space later.

The Windows
There are fourteen of these, and the inner front door is also mostly glass (there’s a timber outer ‘storm door’ as well). Two of the windows are bay windows each with three separate sash windows, and three are double sashes also divided by stone mullions, so in terms of sash windows we have a total of 21 of these. And they are not small – on the ground floor each bay window has a total glass area of over 4 square meters, and each individual sash window on the first floor has a glass area of nearly 1.6 metres.

These 21 windows light a total of 12 rooms, the five on the first floor being bedrooms plus one study (plus the bathroom), the four on the ground floor living rooms, plus another study, and the rooms in the basement a further bedroom and bathroom plus a workroom and utility cupboard.