After spending more than a century as a sterile dental surgery, this Georgian house has been lovingly renovated stage by stage
WORDS CAROLINE EDNIE PHOTOGRAPHY DAVID BARBOUR
While honeymooning in Sardinia, Italy, in August 2012, Lorna and Themis Agorastos spotted a Georgian villa in the Portobello suburb of Edinburgh, Scotland, that would become their home. ‘Themis and I saw the house on a property website,’ says Lorna. ‘On our return we went to an open viewing and fell in love with it.’
The couple had been looking for a renovation project in the city, and the Grade B listed property hit the mark. ‘Built in 1824, the house had later been converted into a dental surgery,’ Lorna explains. ‘There was still a dentist’s chair in one of the rooms, all of the walls were covered in white panelling and the vinyl flooring laid on thick concrete screed. We didn’t know what we’d find behind everything, but had a feeling the bones of the house were still there.’ As soon as the property was theirs, and after gaining planning consent to change the building’s use from commercial to residential, architect Lorna, 42, and engineer Themis, 46, started on what was to become a lengthy restoration and remodelling project. Lorna had prepared all the necessary drawings for the planning application and for a separate building warrant application, which was submitted to the Building Standards department at the local council.
Staying in a temporary home until the house was liveable, they took on as much of the work themselves as possible. ‘We couldn’t afford to convert and restore the house all at once and we didn’t need all of the space,’ Lorna explains. ‘So we worked through it one room at a time.’
Their first move was to tackle the two rooms that needed the least amount of attention – a bedroom and the den, hiring tradespeople for the work they couldn’t do themselves. ‘We spent weeks removing woodchip paper from the den’s walls and ceiling,’ says Lorna. But by May 2013, using these rooms as a base, they were able to move in, setting up a temporary kitchen with a camping stove and slow cooker.
Built on the original foundations of an old utility structure, the 9sqm dining area extension was the first major construction, which was completed with the help of a contractor. It has
