"WE'RE now under water," says David Weir, director of Dovecot Studios. He is speaking figuratively, of course: we are standing in what used to be the women's pool of Infirmary Street Baths, Edinburgh's first public baths, opened in 1887.
This long neglected shell of a building is now chalking up another milestone, having undergone an £8 million conversion into a new workshop
and international-class exhibition area for Dovecot, the tapestry workshop which, over almost a century, has
produced some of the world's largest and finest wall hangings. Open to the public from this week, this visionary refurbishment has not only created a spectacular new working space for a distinguished name in the annals of British arts and crafts, and saved a long neglected Edinburgh municipal building; it has given a significant nudge to the capital's existing art – and perhaps more pertinently craft – showcase capacity. It opens with two major exhibitions – Influential Voices: Weaving Influences, charting the impact of artists such as Henry Moore, David Hockney and Eduardo Paolozzi on the tapestry workshop's output over the past 50 years, and Raising the Bar, a display of contemporary silver and other metalwork by artists from Scotland and beyond.
You could say that Infirmary Street weaves together two distinct strands of Victorian idealism – the social vision of the baths, opened in 1887 to provide sorely lacking basic washing facilities for a crowded Old Town, and the Arts and Crafts inspired vision of Dovecot, founded in 1912 by the fourth Marquess of Bute, a friend of William Morris.
Amid the hard-hatted bustle and the snarl of machine tools of a building site fast approaching deadline, Weir takes me through the elegant spaces emerging out of the shell of the old baths, which closed their doors in 1995, although its women's pool had been roofless and overgrown since a fire in the 1950s. Basically, they have excavated under the smaller derelict women's pool and the larger general pool, to provide two spacious ground-floor galleries, while the first floor, on what would have been the main pool surface level, sweeps up into the lofty weaving hall, with its elegantly-arched Victorian roof timbers supported on cast-iron columns. Ideally fit for purpose, the weaving hall allows ample height for the biggest of Dovecot's looms, which was first assembled at the studio's old Corstorphine premises to create the largest tapestry woven in Britain during the 20th century, a commission for the British Library.
Generously proportioned skylights fill the work space with light, while the wide galleries have been cleared of their old bath cubicles and turned into a public viewing platform and further potential gallery space. Under them, a "yarn library" will add a multicoloured backdrop to the work area. "You can't fail to be creative in a space like this," says Weir. "When the sun comes out and the clouds are spinning overhead it's just extraordinary."
Architect for the project is Malcolm Fraser, who designed such notable city buildings as DanceBase, the Scottish Poetry library and the Scottish Storytelling Centre. He has complemented the baths' Italianate facade with simple, zinc-clad "floating boxes", housing rentable office space and five new duplex apartments (sale of which will help fund the project), their large glazed areas giving superb views over the Old Town. The baths' old chimney has been retained as a landmark and, one suspects, as a feature for future illumination.
Excavating under the pools involved breaking out much more concrete than had been expected. "It was an expensive bullet to bite," Weir admits, but he hopes that the long-term advantages of two "white box" gallery spaces of 2,000 and 3,500ft will justify the expenditure.
Accommodated for much of its life in a house in Corstorphine (where a neighbouring 16th Century "doocot" gave it its name), Dovecot Studios, also known as the Edinburgh Tapestry Company, has earned itself an international reputation since it was founded in 1912 by the fourth Marquess of Bute, whose family supported it financially until 2001. While it has worked with artists of the stature of Frank Stella, Eduardo Paolozzi and Elizabeth Blackadder, and for such top-dollar clients as the Chase Manhattan Bank, the British Library and Riyadh Airport, it has also weathered successive financial crises. It almost folded in 1984, but was saved by winning one of its best-known commissions, a gigantic Frank Stella abstract hanging for PepsiCo's headquarters in New York.
In 2001, it seemed consigned to the fine arts history books when the seventh Marquess, millionaire racing driver Johnny Dumfries, declared that his family could no longer support it. But as the looms were moved out of the Corstorphine premises, they were bought up by a group including Weir, a lawyer, and chaired by Alastair Salvesen, an art-loving member of the shipping and sea food dynasty with a long-standing interest in the tapestry company.
The Dovecot was temporarily installed in a large annexe at Edinburgh's Donaldson's College for the Deaf, and continued to produce work such as a £100,000 tapestry for Edinburgh University's faculty of medicine at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. As it moves into Infirmary Street, it has just finished a regimental tapestry for the Highland Division, and another for a recently launched private yacht.
Astonishingly, the studios' ambitious new home has been created without any subsidies, all the money having been donated by Alastair Salvesen – a measure of his determination to see the studio flourish once again. Salvesen agrees that, at £8 million, the conversion has been much more costly than anticipated: "We had to decide whether to just floor over the baths, or excavate and make use of the space beneath. I decided we'd dig out the baths, which we did, thereby creating a whole floor of exhibition space.
"We're looking for excellence. We want this to be recognised worldwide as the top place for tapestry, and we also want it to become the centre for crafts and design in Scotland."
Infirmary Street puts Dovecot on an exciting new footing from which to celebrate its centenary in four years' time, but it is also likely to have a big impact on Edinburgh gallery space, providing a unique centre for craft and design allied with a working studio. "Tapestry exists in a sort of hinterland between art, craft and design," says Amanda Game, a founder-director of the recently formed agency IC:Innovative Crafts, based in the new studios, which has helped curate the two opening exhibitions. "Normally arts and crafts are divided up and shown in independent institutions. This is a building with making at its heart, which allows them to come together again – and which I think is unique in the UK."
The painter David Bellany, whose work has been woven into tapestry form more than once by Dovecot, once described the old studio as one of the most creative places in Scotland. Its new home seems set to live up to that.
• Dovecot Studios is at 10 Infirmary Street, Edinburgh, open Mondays to Saturdays, 11am to 6pm. Admission is free. Further details are at
www.dovecotstudios.comThe full article contains 1191 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
