Northern light.

An extension to a Victorian house in Edinburgh skilfully resolves the tension between old and new with invigorating and delightful results.

Richard Murphy Associates' scheme for the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh (AR December 1993) demonstrated an ability to handle the competing claims of tradition and modernity with skill and clarity. On a much more modest scale, the practice's design of an extension to a private house has tailored such skills with precision to a small site with delightful results.

The house, on the south side of Edinburgh, is late Victorian, semi-detached and stone. Built on a site that slopes steeply back from a leafy residential street, it had a boiler/utility room projecting from the back and raised on a stone plinth, and an external staircase rising from a small garden to a dark kitchen. Away to the southeast is a distant view of Arthur's Seat. The clients wanted the back of the house opened up to the light, surrounding greenery and the view; and asked for a kitchen which could be partly hidden from a dining area.

In devising a solution, the architects have elaborated on the idea of a verandah. In doing so, they have employed a Modernist vocabulary to fashion a light elegant structure that has the effect of sliding the inside of the house effortlessly out into the open air, creating an internal impression of perpetual light in a Scottish climate.

The original kitchen was removed and turned into a dining room, and the kitchen placed in the new extension over the original plinth that once supported the utility room. This was excavated and made to contain a new study and replacement utility room. Poised airily against the solidity of stone, the new structure consists of a steel frame which flies out from the building and supports a lead covered roof.

The walls, freed from any supporting function, dissolve at the corners into large sliding doors on the south-east, and two sliding windows on the northeast. A hanging balcony contains a perch-like seat on which the clients like to take their breakfast in the morning sun, and from here, elevated above the garden, one can see Arthur's Seat.

Internally, the austere design of the kitchen is based on the recurring idea of sliding constructional planes, and is composed of warm western red cedar and white surfaces that reflect light flooding in from the balcony, and from a top light. At night when the kitchen is lit up, the structure appears to float in the darkness.