Ferguson | Arrant Land

Ferguson is a small place to stay in the Southside of Glasgow, and the result of an unusual collaborative process between a developer, an architect and a maker.

Named after the found nameplate of a previous occupier, the small ground floor tenement apartment was purchased by Duncan Blackmore as a place to stay when in the city supporting other projects. Conversations with existing collaborators, Lee Ivett and Simon Harlow, led to a replanning of the space and the installation of a highly unusual and spatially rich interior. With all works carried out over lockdown, the design evolved through distanced communications.

The raising of existing structural openings close to the ceiling and insertion of pragmatic new ones allows the small space to be explored in three dimensions. Where once there were dark ‘dead ends’, a stroll ‘around’ the apartment is now possible. Where once the 3.4m tall volume felt disproportionately high, a defined mezzanine level now contains a sleeping space with high-level views to all parts of the apartment.

In plan, all explicit function - washing, sleeping, cooking, sleeping, the business of arrival - is pushed to the edges, resulting in a unusual proportion of lateral unprogrammed space.

In a small space, everything but the cooking arrangements is of an unusually large scale. A over-scaled red cast concrete butler sink is accessible for handwashing on arrival from the entrance hall, as well as serving the kitchen. 2m high South facing sash windows give light to a space featuring a 2.7m long ‘floating’ bench, a work surface in the form of an enlarged cill and little else.

Behind the apartment’s only internal door, an atmospheric shower room, fully lined in two colourways of Mirrl’s Fossil surface sits below the sleeping space and borrows light from the main space. A custom yellow sink nestles within the wall.

The entire interior was fabricated, not by builders, but by professional artist’s technicians, Simon Harlow and Simon Richardson, giving richness to the space through an extreme level of care – not just in the execution of a pre-existing design, but in intuitive creative detailing.

Photography: Pierce Scourfield

Website: https://www.piercescourfield.com/