Hospitality projects have their own unique, market driven timelines. The more time they’re being built/renovated/repaired is the less time they are earning money, so tourism projects must be quick! Add into the mix the shorter season that Scotland has and that makes quick even quicker. The new chalets at Lochend have developed over a 12-week period from site start to guests arriving and this is phase 2 of a longer development strategy at this site – here’s hoping we get even quicker next year!   

Its sometimes a strange feeling when you hand over a project to a client – especially one as all-consuming as Monachyle Beag. I never got blasé about it, I never got tired of the views from it and I never got bored of the endless obstacles we had to navigate. However now it is finally drawing to close and the building will start its new life as a place for the owners to enjoy it’s a precious moment for me to pause for breath and look back over the three years from the first moment the client stood on a rock on a mountainside and proclaimed he wanted his new hunting lodge right there. I’ll soon enough be engulfed in another project (i.e tomorrow!) and be solving a whole other set of problems but for now it’s the most rewarding part of this job – to sit back and enjoy what you’ve created for a fleeting moment before the band starts playing again.  

2018 sees us finally getting deeply into the project at Turnbull Street for the renovation and Conversion of the Old Central Police Station. Its a Grade B listed building and is in pretty poor condition in many places. However, it is a fundamentally sound, very well built brick and concrete building so the renovation strategy doesn’t propose too many major alterations to the building complex.  So a three phase development is proposed over the next 2-3 years that will hopefully bring this important building back into Glasgow’s consciousness and further assist in the slow movement eastwards of re-development.