Hanover Street was one of the first streets built in Edinburgh’s New Town.
Rafaela Taylor’s flat is in a building that went up around 1785, and it’s Category A listed as the oldest surviving double-bowed tenement in the New Town, which is how her living room got its curved bay window.
For about forty years, nobody lived here — the flat was an office from the 1970s until 2010. It was then turned back into a home, roughly, by owners who never planned to live in it.
When Rafaela bought it in 2016 there were still office blinds in the living room, and the title deeds still referred to the ladies’ and gents’ toilets. “It didn’t feel like a home,” she says.
She started with the walls. Under the shiny yellow office wallpaper was bare plaster. Her friend, who was bolder than she was at the time, talked her into leaving it as is; now, in the evenings, when the sun swings round into the living room, the plaster, the plants and the artwork all turn gold.
Other finds were less welcome: asbestos in the 1970s office tiles under a bedroom floor, lead paint and a mummified pigeon behind a fireplace. In another bedroom, under layers of self-levelling compound, a flagstone floor showed where the flat’s original kitchen had been.
As a little girl, Rafaela begged her mum for palm trees in her bedroom. Now the living room is a jungle of enormous plants that people were giving away on Gumtree because they had outgrown their owners’ ceilings. She washed the hallway in blue, right across the ceiling, and during lockdown she and her sister painted a bedroom ceiling with stars.
Almost nothing here is new: the furniture is second-hand, down to a £15 sofa from a country shop in Sweden, and the rest was made by her or her sister, or handed down by family; her own drawings hang on the walls.
Today, Rafaela, an illustrator and former architect, lives here with her partner and her daughter. With a three-year-old who needs parks nearby, she’s now selling her place.
It isn’t an easy goodbye. “If we could just transport this flat somewhere else, that would be absolutely perfect,” Rafaela laughs.
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