Brown’s of Leith and Preston Tower win at Scottish Design Awards 2026
Today we celebrate two GRAS projects recognised at the Scottish Design Awards 2026. Brown’s of Leith received the Gold Award in the Interior Design category. Preston Tower, Doocot and Gardens received the Silver Award in the Conservation category.
Brown’s of Leith occupies the former George Brown & Sons engineering works on the Shore in Leith. For more than 130 years the Category B-listed building housed engineers and metalworkers. It opened in November 2025 as the first phase of its refurbishment and conversion, now a space shared between food, drink and creative practice. Jewellery, textile art, food and drink are made on site, with further studios and event space planned on the upper floors. The building continues the Custom Lane ecosystem GRAS established in 2016, across the Water of Leith. New elements are held to three materials: stainless steel, reclaimed sandstone and linen. Free-standing steel by The Ritual Works defines the space without dividing it. The bar is built from reworked waste brick from Hutton Stone’s Darney quarry. Linen filters the light and settles the acoustics. The original gantry cranes remain overhead, working.
Gunnar Groves-Raines: “We felt a deep responsibility to ensure that whatever happened next, it remained a place for making and production.”
Preston Tower, Doocot and Gardens is a scheduled monument in the centre of Prestonpans, standing with its doocot in a walled garden kept open to the town as a public park. Internal access had been closed for decades. The brief was to consolidate the structures, improve access, and provide interpretation of the site. The repairs were phased, set by the condition of the fabric and the limits of public funding. Fragile stone was consolidated, eroded stone cut out and matched, decayed corbels remade. A new stair in metal and stone opens the upper levels while keeping the tower’s earlier and later phases legible.
Preston Tower has been widely recognised this year. It received a 2026 RIAS Award. Natasha Huq, who led the project, received the MJ Long Prize for Excellence in Practice and RIAS/Equitone Project Architect Award. The RIAS jury read the work as careful stewardship of heritage, delicate and rigorous and valued by the town that lives around it.
Both projects reflect GRAS’s continued commitment to working with memory, material and place, allowing the past to shape meaningful futures. The same conservation ethos runs through each: read the fabric, repair what can be saved and add only what is needed.
Thank you to the Scottish Design Awards jury and to the clients, collaborators, craftspeople and communities behind both projects.