High Sunderland Galashiels, Scottish Borders Modern Home, 20th Century Luxury House Scotland, Architect

High Sunderland, Galashiels by Loader Monteith

23 June 2022

RIBA Awards 2022 Winning Buildings and Architects

High Sunderland is one of the 29 winners of the 2022 RIBA National Awards for architecture. There were three winners in Scotland.

Photos : Dapple Photography

RIBA Awards 2022

High Sunderland Wins an RIAS Award in 2022

6 June 2022

High Sunderland, Galashiels by Loader Monteith

This Modern Scottish property wins an RIAS Award in 2022

It is one of the eight exceptional buildings as winners of Scotland’s national architecture awards.

High Sunderland is a 1957 Category A-listed modernist icon designed by Peter Womersley.

Its future was in jeopardy following a fire in 2017 until new owners Juliet Kinchin and Paul Stirton appointed architects Loader Monteith to undertake an extraordinarily careful and skilful restoration.

Jury Report

High Sunderland in Galashiels

Our visit to Bernat Klein’s Peter Womersley designed High Sunderland began with a wrong turn.

Generally viewed as pejorative, sometimes going the wrong way leads to good conclusions and that was the case on our visit as came across the Klein studio before reaching High Sunderland and such is the quality and surprise over stumbling across a concrete and glass concoction in the Scottish borders that our entire party, including the driver, gasped as one.

We knew we were in for a treat.

But herein lies the difficulty with the conservation work that Loader Monteith have forensically carried out. The quality of the architecture at High Sunderland should be in no doubt, of its period, the house is one of the best examples of late modernism in the UK. But we were here to judge the conservation work carried out to the house after a fire.

The great skill here is there no evidence of fire at all and the interior of the house looks and feels as the same as it would have done the last time Bernat Klein left High Sunderland after nearly 60 years of living there. The architects were keen to show us some paint marks left by Bernat in the circulation above the sunken living space, where he cleaned his brushes while painting his vivid abstracts.

Perhaps conservation work of this nature needs to be split at the beginning to describe what can and can’t be done. The big elephant in the room is how to improve energy efficiency in classic buildings festooned in single glazing. The answer here is that at the moment, nothing can be done within reasonable budgets without completely altering the character of the building so the single glazing is there to stay.

What has been tackled is the energy efficiency in other ways. The roof has been heavily insulated to improve warmth in the winter months and to reduce overheating in the summer and new heat pump provides the heat necessary to drive the new wet underfloor heating system in the sunken living area.

Entering and leaving High Sunderland you have the same feeling, that of visiting a design classic, one that is the age that it is and not one having undergone technological improvements and a devastating fire. And that is why this is an award-winning conservation project.

High Sunderland Galashiels House – Property Information

RIBA region: Scotland
Architect Practice: Loader Monteith
Date of Occupation: October 2020
Client company name: Juliet Kinchin and Paul Stirton

Sections:

Project town: Galashiels
Contract Value: £290,000
Gross internal area: 273 M2
Net internal area: 230m2
Cost per m2: £2,000
Contractor company name: Laurence McIntosh

Elevations: