Skinny red bricks link Edinburgh Georgian home to its garden

A pale-stone Georgian townhouse in Edinburgh, Scotland, now opens to its garden through a single-storey extension clad in skinny red bricks.

The project is called Newhaven, after its location in the Newhaven Conservation Area, a zone where historic character is protected by planning controls. It was designed by Pend, a Scottish architecture studio, to improve the connection between the home and its garden, Dezeen reported on 23 September 2026.

Pend is based in Leith, a district in Edinburgh, and was founded in 2021 by Jamie Anderson. The studio focuses on residential projects, meaning houses and flats rather than offices or public buildings. That focus shapes Newhaven, which is about daily use rather than display.

Before the work, the house had a raised and compartmentalised front, with small rooms cut off from each other. At the rear stood a neglected conservatory, a glass-walled sunroom, and a shed. The new extension clears that end and starts again.

The extension provides a secondary entrance into the home. Think side door, not front door. That entrance opens into a new living area, which then leads through to a dining space and a central kitchen.

The plan is simple to follow. You arrive, step into a place to sit, then walk toward food and family. The contrast is deliberate. The thin red bricks stand apart from the pale stone of the existing townhouse, while picking up on brickwork infills previously used to repair the home's curved masonry walls.

Inside the extension is a small study that looks onto the garden through a porthole-like window, a small round opening similar to those on ships. It gives one quiet corner a direct view outside. The garden becomes part of working from home.

Pend has applied similar thinking elsewhere in Edinburgh, Scotland. Background listings describe a curved brick extension to a Victorian house in the city and a renovation of a traditional semi-detached property. Its Catalog House added a gently curved 35-square-metre rear extension that opens onto a west-facing terrace, according to ArchDaily.

What makes this stand out is the plain logic. Keep the old street front. Fix the back so the garden is easy to reach every day.