Raspberry ripple

NEIGHBOURS ARE HANDY when you need a cup of sugar. However, if you live in a traditional tenement flat, so prevalent in Scottish cities, you may well have had enough of bumping into the lady from downstairs who keeps complaining about the noise of your washing machine. Which is why two new five-star rental apartments in Edinburgh's Castle Terrace hold such fantasy home appeal for us locals (let's hope out-of-towners understand our excitement).

Unusually for a Georgian townhouse, this three-storey property features just two flats to one stairwell. Open the glossy white door and you're drawn into a glamorous, tartan-carpeted foyer. The wooden handrail guides you along a vibrantly painted purple and slate grey hall towards your skylight-illuminated destinations – the apartments 9a and 9b Castle Terrace, each inhabiting its own floor.

Layout-wise, the flats are identical; it's the colour schemes that ring the changes. Favour a clean-lined, minimalist, 1960s feel? Go for the lower floor with its colour theme of lime and sand – it's everywhere, from the wallpaper to the bespoke armchairs in the living room, to the splashback in the kitchen. But for my money the flat on the top floor is the pice de rsistance. Here, the appointed interior decorator, Malcolm Duffin Design & Decoration, has gone for an eye-catching combination of raspberry, plum and coral hues.

"Hiring an interior designer was a big step for us," says Liz Martin, a member of the property development team at Castle 8 Properties, which specialises in redeveloping historic and listed buildings. The company's other properties, all redesigned in-house, have more of a classic feel, but for these two, they wanted something more radical.

"We decided that if we were going to pay him, we'd let Malcolm Duffin do whatever he wanted," Martin says.

"At one point, though, I was e-mailed a picture of the main bedroom, which had just been given a coat of shockingly bright purple paint and I couldn't sleep that night. I replied first thing in the morning and told him to stop work immediately. Luckily, he never got my message, and when I visited the flat, the room looked fabulous."

Thank goodness for technical glitches then, as this en-suite room is grown-up and glamorous. The raspberry walls are echoed in a velvety throw on the bed and contrast with the cocoa-coloured furniture. Original details have been left well alone, so you can still enjoy the look of the Georgian tiled grate and elaborate cornices, and the early, cast-iron radiators.

The sash windows are another period feature still in place, offering an outlook on to a couple of smallish, leafy back gardens.

This, of course, is a pretty standard rear vista in the capital, and certainly doesn't trounce the sight you'll see when you look out of the windows in the front-facing living room – this is quite possibly the best view of Edinburgh Castle in the capital. To draw attention to it, Malcolm Duffin has chosen a set of heavy silk curtains with a deep-red velvet trim, to frame both the window and the panorama.

Whether visitors in August will appreciate the nightly pop and bang of the 11pm fireworks, set off to mark the climax of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo at the castle, is a moot point. However, I'm sure whoever rents this apartment will be staying up late anyway, to drink in not just the view but the fabulous interior design of this, the biggest room in the apartment.

"We were looking for something top notch and we didn't want to stand in the way of the designer's vision for this huge space," says Martin.

"The artworks are from a company called Business Art, the glittery silver pouffe is from Jeffrey's Interiors in Stockbridge, as are a lot of the other pieces of furniture in both our flats, which were all specially created. We thought it was quite courageous of us to have everything made bespoke, but we decided to spend that extra cash to get it right."

The other attention-grabbing facet of this room is an entire wall of raspberry and putty-coloured flock wallpaper by Designers Guild.

In the kitchen, which faces the back of the property, a rectangle of this exclusive paper is framed above the breakfast table – a nice way of uniting the decor from room to room.

Not that such details are really needed to pull the look together – the bright berry shades, like the lime greens in the apartment below, do that quite easily.

Of all the rooms in the two flats, the kitchens are the most consistent, with their slate-effect Karndean vinyl floors and "zebrano" kitchen units, characterised by natural zebra-like striped markings on the wood. But in each, it's the splashback that steals the show – and upstairs that means a full-on, glossy stripe of vibrant, carnation-coloured glass.

Overall, this flat has had a major boutique-style makeover – no expense has been spared or detail disregarded. It's not bad for a once grand apartment that had slumped into disrepair.

"It was sad and semi-derelict when we found it," says Martin.

"It had been used as an office and had a horrible, sticky carpet, tacky brass chandeliers and was generally falling apart.

"It had been empty for years and the last time it had been decorated was probably during the 1970s.

"Because of their location, room sizes, and the fact that the building itself has that private stair, we thought these apartments really deserved our special attention. It'll certainly be difficult for us to ever go back to magnolia and beige now."

• www.theedinburghaddress.com

• www.castle8properties.co.uk