Forget anything else you might have heard: Merchiston is definitely the most exclusive area in Edinburgh.
After all, what other part of the city boasts multi-million pound houses, and has been home to J.K. Rowling, Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith - at one point, all at the same time.
The glut of writers led to the posh part of town being nicknamed the 'Writer's Block', despite the fact Rowling moved to the almost-as-fancy Barnton area near Cramond in 2012 after putting her incredible £2.25m home on the market. You can see a gallery of her former home (1 Abbotsford Park) above. The property was dubbed ‘Fortress Rowling’ by neighbours because of its security fences and reinforced doors.
Ian Rankin lived in his Merchiston house from 2003 until a short time ago. He and his wife have just sold his eight-bedroom mansion for a whopping £2.1m (just shy of the final price of Rowling's home). Not bad for someone who grew up on a council estate in Fife.
The three-storey house was built by its first owner, the architect Stair Kerr, in 1878 and has since been extended on numerous occasions.
Britain's leading crime writer and his wife are moving to a beautiful penthouse in the Quartermile development instead - what was once the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh beside the Meadows. The lofty home has four bedrooms and costs an impressive £2.2m.
Rankin recently took to Twitter to talk about the difficulties of downsizing, and gave numerous treasured items to local charity shops in and around Morningside and Bruntsfield as a result.
He also compiled 19 boxes of his work, letters and papers into a selection of fascinating archives, which will, in his words, "soon to be on their way to the vaults of the same building where I did most of the work on my (never finished) thesis", i.e. the National Library of Scotland.
That leaves Alexander McCall Smith as the only writer still flying the flag for Merchiston.
The author of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency books has lived in their beautiful house in the leafy, quiet area for 29 years. He writes all of his books at his house (which you can see parts of in the video below.
What's more, not only did these writers used to live close to each other, but Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall Smith used to regularly pop round to each other's mansions, too.
Rankin writes:
"The area of the city where I make my home is known locally as “writers’ block,” in the main because J.K. Rowling, Alexander McCall Smith, and I live within a few hundred yards of each other. Nor do we keep ourselves to ourselves: local café owners know that Ms. Rowling still writes at various tables with a mug of coffee beside her; Professor McCall Smith and myself have been known to share a few drams of malt of an evening, while discussing everything and anything."
It's certainly enough to make us extremely jealous.
Basically, it seems that in order to get one of these amazing houses in Merchiston, you need to either write a bestselling series of crime novels, a series of whimsical detective-based books set in Botswana... or seven of the most widely-read and most beloved children's books of all time.
Challenge accepted.
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