Climb this stairway

A lion has taken up residence at the bottom of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. Just a small lion, probably too small to be noticed by the tourists who are taking each other’s pictures outside the chip shop as they sample that peculiar Scottish delicacy, the deep-fired Mars Bar. As for the hard-helmeted, yellow-coated worker bees buzzing around the Scottish Parliament which continues to make slow painful progress, they’re surely far too busy to look across the road and see it. Still, there it sits, up on its haunches, painted red, with a sword on one paw, a sceptre on the other and a crown on its head. A king of beasts it would seem, which is only appropriate, given its surroundings.

The lion – it doesn’t have a name, or if it does, not one its creator Jill Watson is going to own up to in public – sits above the entrance to the capital’s newest tourist attraction, within the grounds of Holyrood Palace itself. It guards the Queen’s Gallery, a custom-made space to display items from the Windsor family’s extensive collection.

As yet it’s also an empty space, but a rather handsome one. This is no Jay Jopling-style White Cube gallery. Instead, it’s all sinuous, sensuous curves and bold colour. Imagine a 21^st-century version of Windsor Castle’s Red and Green Rooms without the clutter and your half way there. The centrepiece is the staircase, constructed in three separate parts by Charles Taylor Woodwork of Dalkeith.

Around the top of the staircase, a balcony railing constructed from oak describes an elegant arc. But today that sweep of wood is being interrupted by Watson and five of the other artists and craftspeople whose work graces the gallery’s interior. Three men and three women have lined up to have their photograph taken. Some have met before and some are meeting for the first time. The buzz of conversation – of old friendships renewed and new ones being forged – disrupts the churchy hush, a hangover, perhaps, from the building’s original use. Right in the middle of all these words is the man responsible for what we can see around us, the man who in two years, has transformed two old buildings – a church and a school – into one new one that, from next week, will house exhibitions, including the works of Fabergé and Leonardo da Vinci.

Benjamin Tindall is a small man who, over the past few years, has made a big mark on the capital. Two years ago he remoulded the Gothic gloominess of The Hub into a suitably theatrical home for the Edinburgh Festival. His company also designed the Festival Fringe shop and offices and was involved in the restoration of John Knox House and that’s only scratching the brickwork of his CV. He is establishing himself as the architect the Edinburgh establishment automatically looks to, although he is equally at home designing something like the shop front of the city’s Kalpna Indian restaurant.

Tindall has the look of a patriarch, all bald pate and  flowing beard, and today he is showing me round his latest baby. “This is a radical approach,” he says, as he takes  me up the stairs and on to the specially constructed upper floor. “To be safe this should have been a box within a box, and it should be white. Ours is a high risk design and it won’t please everybody.” Not that this seems to bother him.

He has been parenting this project since the turn of the new millennium, bringing on board the various glassblowers and sculptors who have helped to decorate this gallery and are now gathered around the balcony.

“I view that as an important part of the architect’s responsibilities,” he tells me in a break from posing. He has worked with many of them before on The Hub. One of them, Jill Watson, he is even married to. “You get a huge commitment from artists,” he says of the collaboration, “They’re perfectionists.”

And so is he, by all accounts. That said, the Queen’s Gallery is a relatively modest affair. The budget to reshape the former Holyrood Free Church and the Duchess of Gordon’s School into a gallery space was set at £3m (funded entirely by the Royal Collection, as its publicist is keen to point out. The Windsors have probably seen enough bad headlines in this Jubilee year.) And, unlike its near neighbour the Scottish Parliament, Tindall has stuck to it. “No creep allowed,” he says. That’s not to say it’s been easy. “It demands a huge commitment from the architect. You have got to be very flexible. You have to be able to jettison ideas and come up with a much cheaper design – even when you’ve already done a beautiful spec that could not be bettered – in order to make a saving of £60,000.”

Given that his mother was an architect and his father was a planner, there was something inevitable about Tindall’s career path. Walking me into the space, through the entrance, up the stairs and round the intimate room that was once a school, he enthuses all the while on the design solutions needed to meet the hugely demanding technical specifications of a modern art gallery. As we pass through the entrance door he describes the air ducts beneath our feet, deep enough and wide enough to stand up in. “When things look as simple as this you usually know a huge amount of effort has gone into it,” he says.

But this work is all below the surface, or buried in the bright blue walls. The gallery’s blue colour scheme was chosen by the Royal Collection after exhaustive tests. Colour is something of a trademark for the architect. “It is very important and underappreciated,” he says. “I think everyone is fascinated by colour. A lot of designers wear black. Colour is risky. It’s a statement that can easily go wrong. So it’s much safer to go white or grey. But it’s part of nature to enjoy colour.” And Tindall, by the way is wearing blue, set off with a red woollen waistcoat.

We’re not used to such boldness. Remember the clamour when Edinburgh’s National Gallery was painted boudoir red in 1988? When Tindall imbued The Hub with a similar red richness one critic accused him of “kitschification”. It’s an accusation Tindall won’t even dignify with a comment when I bring it up.

Anyway the boldness of the gallery colour merely masks the simplicity of a design that is Scandinavian in inspiration – the result of a gap year Tindall spent in Denmark during the eighties. “I learned to love beautiful design,” he says of that Scandinavian experience. “That’s the serious point. Style is a secondary consideration, whereas in the Mediterranean style is the primary consideration.”

Christian Shaw is one of those rare people whose father actively encouraged him to play with glass when he was a boy. He has been making stained glass windows since he was seven. An example of his work will be one of the first things visitors see as they walk down the Royal Mile. It’s an image of a gallery to mirror what’s happening inside, a secular take on what has always been a traditionally religious art form. “Stained glass still has a bit of a churchy feel to it,” Shaw admits. “But people are trying to be more innovative with glass, trying to put it into a different context. If you look at America, Iceland and Germany there’s a huge amount of secular art. Scotland is slightly behind, but it needs foresight from the architects to actually think about using stained glass at the beginning of a project and, too often, there are monetary restrictions.”

It is expensive work. Physically demanding too, as evidenced by the 46 year-old’s whippet-thin physique. Wearing a natty striped blazer, he sits down and describes his passion for glass. He is not the only one. Downstairs Ingrid Philips is equally enthusiastic about the medium. “It’s a molten material that you can freeze in so many states and forms,” says Phillips, who designed the lights that greet the visitors as they enter the gallery, “and I like the actual process of the making of it – the heat of the hotshop and the flexibility I have with his medium.”

Graciela Ainsworth, the Geordie daughter of an Argentine mother, is also happy to wax lyrical, but in her case the subject is stone. It’s the whole physical process she loves, she says. “It’s like dancing. You don’t need massive muscles. You’ve just got to be in tune with your body. It’s the rhythm. You’re not just belting it, the stone works with you.”

Ainsworth is responsible for the carved and gilded garland of flowers that decorates the stone archway on which Jill Watson’s lion sits. She was inspired to make it when she spotted a little red lion guarding the tomb of Mary Queen of Scots in Westminster Abbey. She continues the heraldic theme in the gilded bronze hinges she’s designed for the gallery doors, in which a lion and a unicorn – from the Scottish royal coat of arms – tower massively over illustrations of the Royal Mile and Calton Hill. “When you are dealing with something like a lion or a unicorn you feel you are very much part of art history,” she says. Disappointingly, though, she’s not prepared to also admit to a King Kong influence.

Watson met Tindall when he invited her to work with him on The Hub. “That’s where our personal story began as well,” she says. They even got married in Tindall’s revamp of Pugin’s spiky original building. Quite how they’re going to top that in the gallery they’re not saying. How does marriage affect their working relationship, I wonder. It doesn’t, she says. It’s called professionalism.

Maybe being married to the architect gives her special privileges, though. Is Tindall a hard taskmaster, I ask Christian Shaw. “He is, but he is fair. He’s honest, he’s to the point and you don’t get any mixed messages.”

“He’s demanding,” adds Hamid von Koten, the man behind the wiggle-shaped table of elm, glass and copper that links the entrance to the gallery shop. “But he’s also passionate and that’s always good, I think. It’s a pleasure to work with people like that, rather than people who put problem your way for the sake of it, or because they can’t be bothered, or they’re not all that keen on doing their job. So, I’ve really enjoyed working with him, but he’s also demanding because of that passion. I can respect that and I can respond to it.”

von Koten is a 44 year-old Dutch exile now based in Lesmahagow where he started as a furniture maker and has increasingly moved into the design field. It begs the question – one you could ask of many of the people involved in the gallery – is what von Koten does an art or a craft?

“It’s a difficult question to answer,” he says. “More and more it becomes harder to draw those boundaries. Traditionally, art was something you hung on the wall and it was generally a representation of something, but nowadays, with abstract art and conceptual art, these things are merging more and more with design and craft. I’m probably a bit of both and I kind of like blurring those boundaries.”

Shaw echoes the Dutchman when talking about stained glass. “It should be an art, but it is a craft, as well,” he says. “The craft is the technique of making it, but the art is knowing how to create what you want to create and also being able to understand how far you can push the medium you are working with. A painter is a craftsman, too. He has to understand his tools to be able to do his paintings.”

Charles Taylor, I think it is safe to say, is a craftsman, but what he does he does artfully. His firm is responsible for the staircase that dominates the gallery, including the highly modelled balcony railing at the top which resembles the backbone and adjoining ribs of a giant dinosaur. “This job sets off the whole building,” Taylor says approvingly. “Dimensionally, everything rotates around it. That meant we had to be involved in the site from a very early stage. All of this was manufactured off site in our workshop. This was created in three separate sections and stored until the architect was ready.”

“It’s not a reworked period idea,” he says of the finished article. “It’s not brutally modern either. It’s just working with some very high quality materials in a very rich way.”

Taylor’s obvious mix of pride and pleasure is typical of all the artists who have been involved in the project. Their combined satisfaction fills this empty space today. But in the end, as Tindall points out, “it’s the are that people will come to see, not the building.”

And that’s the key. The gallery walls, stairs and decoration are ultimately just a backdrop. They will only fulfil their purpose when the palace’s collection of Leonardo da Vinci prints is finally hung for the opening.

No matter how successful and impressive the work of Tindall and his associates may be, da Vinci’s work is a lot to live up to. As they know all to well.

“I’m looking forward to seeing the art,” concludes Charles Taylor. “I think that will knock this all for six.”