Our appointment for this project was with a longstanding residential development client whose successful business model is to procure historic Georgian properties around the New Town of Edinburgh which have been previously converted into commercial premises, and convert them to high-end modern apartments to sell or retain as short-term holiday lets.

8 and 9 Albyn Place was our client’s largest acquisition to date, and having already undertaken 6 highly successful conversion projects in the West End of Edinburgh for the same developer in the past 3 years, our initial brief for this project was to convert these two 5-storey Category A-Listed townhouses into luxury residential accommodation for sale on completion.

As such, these historic townhouses, which are currently being used as a language school, will revert back to their original residential use and will be sensitively sub-divided to form a total of 20 units.

The units will offer large open plan living areas, utilising the large proportions and original features of the properties, and will offer modern amenities and luxury finishes throughout.

As ever with the heritage properties that we work on, a well-considered design approach has been taken throughout this project to respect the historic fabric and detailing of the building, whilst improving the fabric of the property in line with current building standards and regulations.

The Planning Application and Listed Building Consent has now been approved and work on site is due to begin in mid-2023.

Despite our initial brief to form residential properties intended for sale on completion, we quickly adapted to a change in our client’s business model and our designs were amended to incorporate a greater density of small short-term let holiday apartments.

Securing Planning and Listed Building Consent for 20 short-term let apartments was an extremely challenging task, however the successful outcome at Planning committee was lauded as a huge accomplishment for Block Nine’s consultancy team.

This bucked the current trend of blanket refusal for short term let applications in Central Edinburgh which has been implemented with the enforcement of ‘Airbnb Licensing’.

Great care and tactful negotiation with the City of Edinburgh Planning team has led to a fantastic outcome for our client and we look forward to seeing the project progress on site over the coming year.