The Stair at Mansfield Traquair

Work took me to a meeting at the SCVO today, in the former Bellevue Reformed Baptist Church, originally designed by R Rowand Anderson as the Catholic Apostolic Church.

By the 1980s the church was out of religious use and storing building materials, but an imaginative and sensitive conversion by Simpson & Brown, and completed in 2002, created a suite of offices in the crypt as the new headquarters for the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations. This included a very clever use of the baptistry to house a modern spiral stair, seen here.

Impressive though the new staircase is, the church is known for its stunning murals by Phoebe Anna Traquair.