Isla Renwick · Architect · Edinburgh
Buildings that sit in the ground as if they were quarried from it.
I design houses, studios and small civic rooms in stone, brick and timber across Scotland, and I stay on site until the last joint is pointed.
In figures
Measured, not estimated
The practice in the numbers I actually keep, updated every January.
Houses, studios and two small civic rooms
Registered architect since 2012
Every consent granted first time
So that I can be on every site myself
Selected work
Six buildings, in the order I would show you round them
The full works register, with drawings and photographs for each project, is on the Work page.
Kilmorack House
A new house on a Beauly hillside, built from the sandstone lifted out of its own foundations and roofed in larch that will silver with the fence posts.
Leith Granary
Six flats and a shared workshop inside a bonded warehouse that had stood empty since 1994, with every brick kept and every window widened by exactly one course.
Kincraig Links Pavilion
A sandstone and blackened-timber pavilion on the dunes that reads as a steading from the road and a lantern from the beach.
Braid Hills Courtyard House
A low concrete house wrapped around a walled courtyard, so that the wind goes over the top and the garden gets the sun.
Corstorphine Garden Studio
A single concrete room at the end of a long garden, for a printmaker who needed north light, a sink and a door that locks.
Portobello Stair
A new precast stair threaded through a Victorian villa so that three floors read as one house again, lit from a single rooflight at the top of the well.
Drawings
From the drawing set
I issue every project as a numbered set. These four sheets are how Kilmorack House left the studio: a site plan, a plan, a section and an elevation, drawn to be read by a mason as much as by a client.
About
The person at the drawing board
I am Isla. I trained in a school that still made us draw by hand and I have never quite stopped: the first idea for every project is a pencil section on tracing paper, and the last is a note on site about the pointing.
My work is mostly houses, a few studios and the occasional small civic room, almost always in stone, brick or timber, and almost always somewhere the weather has an opinion. I take on four or five projects a year so that I can be on every site myself.
Levels
- +0.00 Born in Inverness, in a house my grandfather pointed
- +3.20 Diploma in Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art, 2011
- +6.40 Registered architect, 2012; first house completed the same year
- +9.60 Set up the practice on Candlemaker Row, 2018
- +12.80 Teaching the stone module at the Scott Sutherland School since 2021
Clients
What the people who live in them say
She was on the scaffold more than the plumber was. Our house is warm, quiet and entirely made of things that were already on the farm, and she argued with the mason on our behalf for eleven months.
The drawings were the clearest I have priced in thirty years of building. Every joint was drawn, every stone was accounted for, and when something arrived short she was there the same afternoon with a decision.
The trust wanted a building that would disappear from the road and we got one. What we did not expect was that the cafe would become the village's living room. The committee still argues about the bench.
Journal
Notes from site and studio
Material trials, site diaries and the odd opinion, written on the train home.
Why I still point the last joint myself
An architect on site is either a nuisance or a colleague. Here is how I try to be the second one, and why the last day of a build is the one I never miss.
Site notes: Braid Hills, week nineteen
The roof is on, the courtyard walls are up, and the wind has finally found something to argue with. A fortnightly diary entry from the concrete house on the hill.
What a rammed earth wall in Glen Clova taught me
We rammed the subsoil from a hillside in Angus into 500 mm walls and then waited a winter to see what happened. Notes on mix, shuttering and the things nobody tells you.
Have a site, a ruin or a cold room that needs thinking about?
Tell me where it is and what stands on it now. I take on four or five projects a year and I am booking for 2027.