As picturesque as it might seem at first sight, the addition to Susie Hillhouse and Neil Boyd’s late-Georgian, end-of-terrace home is not simply another cute extension. Scratch beneath the glass facade or the curved, canopied roof and a complete transformation is revealed.

The original house has been reinvented. Two extensions and a reconfiguration of the rooms have turned the dark, cramped, two-bedroom house in north Edinburgh into a light-filled, open-plan, three-bedroom home.

Indeed, so clever is this rearrangement by the South Queensferry-based firm WT Architecture, that the design received this year’s Best Small Project Award at the Edinburgh Architectural Association Awards earlier this month.

It goes to show that reconfiguring existing spaces can be every bit as important when extending a home as the extension itself, as the project’s architect, Wil Tunnell, explains.

“The reconfiguration of space is significant in this case,” he says.

“Sometimes people say that they need more space, when often they’ve already got a lot of space under their roof, but it’s not necessarily in the right order and it can’t be used in a useful way.”

He says it can be surprising what can be achieved by reorganising the interior of a house “simply by just creating little links that allow it to work. In this case, the cost of the extension itself is probably less than half of the overall cost of the project (a modest £85,000).

Overall, I think we have shown that a lot can be achieved out of a relatively small property.”

Yet for all the clarity and cleverness of their reinvented home — a change that the couple felt was necessary to accommodate their growing family — Hillhouse, a museum consultant, says that the final result was achieved only after many changes of heart and during a lengthy gestation period that began when the family moved into the house in 2003.

“Our brief changed dramatically over the period, but I think you have to live in a place long enough to know how your house works,” she says.

“Our motivation changed from looking for more living space to trying to accommodate office space for me, which we didn’t envisage to begin with. It’s a slow process, planning this type of thing. But when we approached Wil, we knew that we wanted a garden room spanning two rooms, and we were also keen to bring in more light into the dark internal spaces.

“The east-facing sitting room at the front of the house was also problematic, because it was so far from the kitchen. I was constantly running back and forth when our eldest son was a toddler.”

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