The Oddfellows Hall in Edinburgh's Old Town is an iconic bar/ pub in this city. This once traditional building has now been refurbished to give it a modern look. The clients, Festival Inns Ltd commissioned architects and designers Lee Boyd to give it a more contemporary appearance and interiors. With the building's double height space, the architects made sure that the building was visible enough from the road side thereby giving it a transparent look from one side. Also the paint was stripped so as to expose the magnificent stone façade of the building.
Trying to incorporate the old and new in the refurbishment, Lee Boyd also utilized the services of Grum Anderson and his company Dynamic Productions for the renovation of the main room of the building. Grum's specialized and technologically advanced lighting scheme was used here at the Oddfellows Hall.
Here, he has created a unique design that uses individual single source LEDs in fixtures customized and set into polycarbonate baroque light fittings to light the points of the vaulted ceiling. More light fixtures under the ventilation ducts throw light on the exposed brick wall, with lights slowly changing colors while rotating and each revolution taking almost an hour to complete and also setting up sculptural plywood moose heads to add some drama to the interiors. Lee Boyd also got a local artist Gregor Laird to design a double height artwork, Garden of Eden piece-Utopia that was put at the bar's entrance.
New additions in the Oddfellows Hall also included setting up a new public house with kitchen facilities on the ground floor and additional public space on the balconies above. Lee Boyd completed the refurbishment of Oddfellows Hall in December 2006 and the entire project cost £1 million. The interiors renovated led to the Hall bagging the Roses Design Awards 2007 for Best Interiors. This once traditional meeting place for members of the Oddfellows order has now been transformed into a hip joint and is now quite a landmark in this part of the country.
- http://www.leeboyd.com/oddfellows.htm
- http://www.nightmagazine.co.uk/venues/OddfellowsEdinburgh.htm
- http://www.edinburgharchitecture.co.uk/oddfellows_hall.htm
