EDINBURGH—A highlight of Bonhams’s ninth annual Scottish sale last month was Robert Forrest’s early 19th-century sandstone depiction of James V, who ruled Scotland in the early 1500s. The salesroom where the auction took place is even older than the sculpture—but you wouldn’t know from looking at it.

Bonhams recently moved its Scottish headquarters into an overhauled Georgian structure in an area of Edinburgh known as New Town. “It’s a period building with a crisp, modern look,” says Robert Bleas­dale, the managing director of Bonhams UK Group. The 6,500-square-foot interior mimics the aesthetic of the firm’s five-month-old Manhattan home, with its polished limestone, glass and Corian, but “applies it to an 18th-century building and takes care to preserve the original features,” says Bleasdale. Downstairs is a large salesroom, and upstairs are two additional, interlinked auction spaces.

The new location is just three doors down from the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, a fitting neighbor, considering that Bonhams is adding four annual sales of the liquor to its Edinburgh lineup. They will be headed by the expert Martin Green, who initiated dedicated whisky auctions at Christie’s in 1983 and most recently worked at McTear’s auctioneers, in Glasgow, where he was responsible for the sale in 2007 of a rare 19th-century Bowmore single malt. “If you can afford to spend £29,400 on a bottle of whisky, then you can certainly afford to drink it,” Green surmises of the Bowmore purchaser. “But I think that’s highly unlikely.”

"Great Scot!" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2008 Table of Contents.