BLOCK NINE @ TEN
A Brief History of the Practice by our Company Director, Sandy Anderson
Dunfuinary Cottage, Oban
A big excuse for a celebration for the practice passed by relatively unannounced this year. April 5th 2020 would have marked our 10th anniversary of BLOCK NINE opening our Edinburgh office, however due to the lockdown restrictions, we celebrated remotely across Zoom calls.
BLOCK NINE’s inception actually dated back to 2009. The recession was biting hard and following 8 years working at senior level with a fantastic practice in London, I started the company as a sole trader working from my old office, a boathouse overlooking the Thames, borrowing from a well established company’s resources. As the UK continued to struggle, the decision was made to return home and establish the business in Scotland, relocating to Edinburgh in April 2010.
In retrospect, this was the best decision we could have made and Edinburgh immediately felt like home. We settled into a Mews house on Calton Hill where the practice commenced its existence in Scotland. A few projects which continued from South of the border were combined with time back in Dundee where I’d studied for 7 years in the 90s, helping out a friend’s design practice. Slowly residential work in Edinburgh started to build and we steadily grew with it. We’ve never made a concerted effort to market ourselves thoroughly, but have always worked with the strong belief that continuing to engage with our clients by carefully listening to their requirements, going over and above what is expected from our appointment, providing a friendly, professional and thorough service, and adapting to their requirements at every stage, from inception to delivery, would result in clients highly recommending us to others.
As our workload grew, the roles of architect, technologist, cost consultant, M+E designer, 3D visualiser, practice manager, book keeper etc mainly fell at my feet during the first couple of years. Having had consultants and fellow staff members to previously fulfil these positions, this multi-disciplinary role was a baptism by fire but an enriching learning experience nonetheless.
Residential work continued to escalate and formed a solid foundation for the growth of the practice. Working extremely hard on the projects we had, was fundamental to this growth and we took pride in building excellent working relationships with all those we worked with, in particular our clients. Critical to this was listening carefully to our clients at every step of the design and delivery process.
In 2012, whilst spending a lot of time back in Dundee and watching it slowly emerge as an ambitious and progressive hub of design, I became captivated with the competition to design the new V&A Museum. At a similar time, I was in discussion with a developer who had hoped to locate a hotel on one of the new sites formed within the waterfront masterplan. This was a good excuse to ingratiate myself with the partners at Cre8 Architecture and the delivery team from Kengo Kuma who had coordinated the winning bid for the V&A. I agreed to rent a desk space within their office which led to many long standing working relationships and the introduction to many new contacts in Edinburgh and across Scotland. This enabled us to start pushing the practice into different architectural sectors and begin to collaborate with other architects and consultants.
2 years later, we moved into our new Castle Street offices, supported by our largest project to date, the design support and technical delivery of 8 new build condominium blocks on a purpose built peninsula in the British Virgin Islands..
Whilst our residential projects still formed the backbone of the company, we also started to work with larger residential developer clients in Edinburgh as well as with 2 frameworks in the Education and Arts sectors as our growth continued. These new projects allowed the practice to strengthen our design portfolio and push the practice in a more diverse and creative direction.
In early 2020, the practice felt like it was in a stronger position than ever, with a highly talented and hard working team within the office, many acclaimed projects under our belt, and a number of exciting projects under construction and on the drawing board. The office truly felt like it was driving in a planned and focused direction when Covid restrictions were imposed in early March. We had to adapt and quickly put measures in place to facilitate the team working remotely. We braved the storm and remained focussed and very busy for the first 4 months of lockdown, with many projects successfully powering through statutory planning consents and building warrant approvals, it felt like business as usual. Our daily 9am team Zoom calls, remote access facilities and Friday night pub quizzes helped maintain the team spirit and alleviated the sense of working in isolation.
However as optimism in the economy started to wain, we experienced a quiet July and were forced to consider how the practice’s future would evolve. Nevertheless, as lockdown measures were eased, we started to experience the full effect of a bounceback and ended August and September very strongly, finding ourselves busier than ever. We decided to embrace this upturn with a long awaited re-brand and relaunch of our website.
We are now assisting many opportune clients looking to take advantage of the opportunities in which a changing market and economy will bring. This has coincided with us being shortlisted for both design awards which our recently completed Bruntsfield project was entered into.
Like our clients, contractors and the consultancy teams we work with, we are determined to buck the trend of the downturn. I believe the practice is now back in an extremely strong position with extremely talented and dedicated staff to help push forwards and embrace the changes. In these unprecedented and unpredictable times, I firmly believe we are all now pushing in the same direction, and we are lucky enough to have a team who not only enjoy working with one another, but have also built on our reputation of being a pleasure for our clients to work with.
Nanny Cay, British Virgin Islands
