
Erskine Stewart’s Melville Junior School
Key Facts
Client
Erskine Stewart's Melville Schools
Location
Queensferry Rd, Edinburgh
Value
£1,300,000
A Stable Block for the Grand House in the Landscape
Project Info
The completion of the Reid House extension marks the first major construction element in the redevelopment of Erskine Stewart’s Melville Schools Junior School on their Queensferry Road campus. The works comprise an extension and alterations to the existing Reid House, an 1800s villa on the edge of the campus, and home to ESMS’s music department. The extension provides a new front door to the Junior School marked by a gated entrance portal.
Building on the strong arrangement of existing garden walls that surround the villas, the design of the lower ground floor can be seen as a continuation of this walled garden theme, acting as a solid plinth to a lighter and more contemporary element on top. This plinth melds into a series of steps, giving the main entrance a strong presence and relationship to the route through the site. Above the plinth, a series of intricately detailed window units express a regular rhythm, echoing the structure and classical regularity of the traditional buildings on the wider site. The over-sailing roof at the building entrance sets the language for an elegant and delicate roofline, anchoring the building firmly in its context.
At the edge of the campus, a new entrance portal marks the route into the School. Steel bars in the bespoke gates twist in a pattern expressing the first notes of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, performed at the closing of Erskine Stewart’s Melville School’s inaugural light opera in 1954.



