Visualisations of Proposed Kitchen Wing

A further series of belated digital scans... 

After making Balintore Castle weatherproof, the plan was to make the kitchen wing habitable. This is a clear no-brainer. The kitchen wing is in relatively better condition than the rest of the castle. Being single-storied (with part basement) and smaller in scale, the complete restoration to comfortable dwelling should in theory be quite achievable. Practice, of course, is something else. Getting planning permission for this took 7 years, only finally coming through in 2014. 

You can imagine my despair during this period! The worse part was being in the castle in the middle of two of the coldest winters on record, unable to do anything to keep the heat from escaping out of the building. I am more than familiar with the onset of hypothermia. The only solution is to get into bed with an electric blanket under three duvets, no matter the time of day or night. This was the only way of keeping any heat around one's body. I have a huge wood-burner which under normal domestic circumstances would be more than enough to heat a very large room.

The irony is that I want to keep the building as close as possible to its Victorian state i.e. there is absolutely nothing contentious in the plans. 

The first image shows the floor plan, and how the service rooms have been converted into domestic accommodation. The meat larder becomes a bathroom; the dairy larder becomes a utility room, you get the idea.

As far as the external appearance is concerned this will hardly change - see the second image. One door opening will become a window (matching the others), and a stable door (now missing) will become a single panel door.

The interesting action takes place with the internal courtyard. The covered walkway will be glazed in - see the third image. This allows two service rooms to be brought into the body of the accommodation. One of these will be the second of two bedrooms. Even though the kitchen is spectacularly large, the kitchen wing still only forms a two bedroom dwelling, so it was important to reclaim that second bedroom.

The fourth image shows the interior of the kitchen and some proposed kitchen units. As we all know, the Victorians did not have kitchen units, but my architect has done a good job in designing something that is practical and somehow "period-credible". Is that a thing?

Anyhow, the full resolution scans can be found on this link. The images below are limited in size by Google!

1. proposed floor plan for kitchen wing

2. proposed north and  east elevations

proposed courtyard with glazed walkway

proposed kitchen interior