Katie Connelly first met her husband, Jordan, a director, in a bar within Saltire Court, a building in the heart of Edinburgh conceived by Scottish architect Ian Arnott. Fast forward to last December and, in a funny turn of fate, the couple and their three children moved into a modernist house in East Lothian, which also happened to be by Arnott. “We only worked it out when we bought it. Jordan and I looked at other things he designed and found out he did the very building we met in. Isn’t that weird?” Katie says.

Katie, Jordan and family (Annabella is one, Goldie is three, Sonny is six) packed up their Georgian flat in the centre of Edinburgh and relocated to the home Arnott originally built for him and his wife in 1963. The house won a Civic Trust Award in 1965 and was so progressive that people from the neighbourhood wrote to the local press to complain about it. “He obviously had a great sense of humour because Arnott would reply to those who moaned about it,” Katie laughs. “But if you touched the building now I think the community would be quite upset about it.” Lucky, then, that the house will soon be listed.

The house comprises a series of boxes, as Arnott described them, arranged around a central living space, as well as angled pop-ups in the roof – made from the same slate as the roof of the nearby church. Other than filling the home with their own belongings – which Katie has styled beautifully – the family haven’t changed a single thing since the Arnott’s resided there. As she wisely puts it: “It’s great to work out why things were done the way they were in the first place.” Here, the fashion stylist explains how her clan has adapted to countryside living and how her connection to Arnott continues, such as how his wife’s gardening books made their way back to Katie at her horticultural time of need.

Katie: “When the house came on the market, I said to Jordan, ‘Can we go and have a look at it?’ Genuinely to be nosy – and then we just fell in love. We had to drive from Edinburgh to London the next day and I didn’t speak to Jordan until we got to Newcastle because he wasn’t fully into the house. I said: ‘I can’t believe you don’t want to move.’ But then, he changed his mind. It just took him a little more time to come to terms with leaving the city behind.

“We put an offer in on a Friday and found out we got it on the Monday. We couldn’t believe it. We’d done no research. We’d hadn’t even heard of the neighbourhood – East Lothian is a lovely part of the world, but we didn’t know anything about it. We’re proper city people – or we were…

“We didn’t move to the countryside because we wanted more room. To be honest with you, the square footage is smaller than our flat in town. We just didn’t want to miss an opportunity to live in a house like this, which is so fun: it has hidden doors, which you can use to segment it. We were really interested to see how this type of modernist house would enhance our living. And as a family with three children, it really has. The house is surrounded by garden, for instance, so the kids can play out there all day and you can keep an eye on them easily from inside.

“Jordan and I thought: ‘We’re going to look at our life in chapters.’ This is the chapter where the kids are small; we don’t get to go to restaurants or bars as much. So let’s, for this chapter, move out to a house that’s more suitable for young children. But now that we’ve done it, I bet that it’ll be difficult to move back because we’re so happy with the garden space. Sonny just comes out here and kicks a ball around. What a lucky little boy! And they jump on the trampoline for ages.

“The open-plan layout can be a little difficult with three children, but we’ve made it work. Jordan is a director and he is often working in a studio or on location. He also has an office he can use if and when he needs to. As I’m a fashion stylist, I don’t work from home that much either; I’m usually out on shoots. And the internet is about five times faster here than it was in the centre of Edinburgh! Jordan does a lot of editing; his company, Studio Something, work on a TV show that is shot on a Wednesday and goes live on a Friday, and on Thursday he edits it remotely. It was really important that the connection was good – he cannot believe how much better it is here than before.

“Our old home was a typical Georgian flat. If you’d created a heat map of how we used the space, it would’ve all centered in the living area – every other room would’ve been ice cold. Now, the whole house is used beautifully. Before the children always just wanted to be in the same room as us, but because of the open-plan design, we always feel connected without being on top of one another. In fact, they are much happier here. They had a little community of friends before, so I thought they’d hate it here, but they love it.

“What’s really sweet is that our neighbour, Shane, who is in his nineties, was friends with Mr. Arnott. He tells us lovely stories about him. I told another neighbour, June, that I’d never gardened before and was nervous about this one, given as it’s more than an acre in size and had been so lovingly cared for by Mrs. Arnott. The next day, June brought me a bunch of gardening books that Mrs. Arnott had gifted her when she first moved to the area in the 1980s. These books had taught Mrs. Arnott how to garden, then June and hopefully me next!

“We also bought a lot of the Arnott’s modernist furniture and we still have their curtains up. But we also have new things too. There’s a really cool furniture school up the road called the Chippendale International School of Furniture. I went to the exhibition where the students sell their work once they’ve finished studying. I bought an amazing bench from a very talented maker, Daniel Smith, which I thought was great not only because it’s local, but it looks like it has been made for this house.

“When you buy a place in the city, you can be super restricted because there’s nowhere to build. We’ve now got a house which we can expand into. There’s so much we can do with the space. There were lots of drawings that Mr. Arnott had done for this place, but just didn’t get round to doing it. Hopefully, we’re going to make the carport into a bedroom and connect it to the house. Sonny has big plans that there will also be a swimming pool in the garden one day… but we keep telling him that this is Scotland – and not LA!”