David Bryce was born in Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, on 3 April 1803, the second of the four children of William Bryce, then described as a mason, and his wife Agnes Todd. William Bryce thereafter became an architect builder, moving to North Richmond Street in 1808. In about 1813 he moved again to Greenside Place from which address his younger sons attended the Royal High School. Sometime before 1815 William Bryce's eldest son, William (junior), who must have been much older than the others, had married and obtained a place in William Burn's recently established practice. To supplement his income William Bryce (junior) established an architectural academy, first in East St James Street, Edinburgh and then at 15 South St James Street. David probably received his earliest architectural training at this academy, thereafter assisting his brother with his pupils and with his private practice which consisted mainly of work for the family building business in Stockbridge. But on 5 December 1823 William (junior) died, leaving his two younger brothers David and John with financial responsibility for his widow and three young children, Margaret, William and David. To provide an income for the family David and John continued the academy, and Burn gave David his brother's place in his office. This arrangement enabled William Bryce Senior to retire from business in 1826, when he moved to Agnes Grove, Trinity. By that date David had achieved a senior position in Burn's office and had taken a house in the family development at Hermitage Place, Stockbridge. This soon proved insufficiently central for the academy and for his private practice which had progressed from church and school commissions passed on to him by Burn to his first known country house (Newton Hall, Fife) designed in April 1829. He moved first to Great Stuart Street and in 1835 to 53 Castle Street, where he was joined by his mother, by then a widow. Some three years earlier, c.1832 his brother John had left the Bryce household and academy to set up independent practice in Glasgow. Nevertheless the brothers remained close, jointly undertaking speculative development in Garnethill and in Cambridge Street in Glasgow.
Very early in their careers David and John Bryce became accomplished in the design of neo-Jacobean ornament, a development related to the transition from neo Tudor to neo-Jacobean in Burn's practice in the years 1826-29. Between 1831 and 1836 David drew out the plates for his 'Sketches of Scotch and Old English Ornament'which still exists in folio form but was never published. More innovatively the brothers were also pioneers of neo-Mannerism and neo-Baroque, making their debut in these idioms at David's St Mark's Unitarian Church in Edinburgh and John's McGavin Monument in Glasgow Necropolis. Their development seems to have had its origin in the 17th-century Italian publications David had acquired, supplemented by tracings taken from others found in the libraries of clients. These studies made possible Burn's completion of Salvin's Harlaxton, and the accomplished detailing of his great houses at Falkland, Whitehill, Stoke Rochford and Revesby: they were also extensively used for the inventive neo-Baroque doorpiece details of Burn's lesser country houses.
In March 1841 David Bryce sought membership of the Institute of Architects in Scotland, formed in August of the previous year with the Duke of Buccleuch as president and Burn as Vice-President. Although he had by then designed three distinguished insurance buildings in Edinburgh's George Street in his own name and was about to build the monumental Edinburgh and Leith Bank in the same street, this request was 'unfavourable (sic) received' as he was regarded as Burn's employee rather than as a principal. Burn then formally proposed him as a fellow at the beginning of May but as his admission was still opposed by the committee, Burn resigned from the Institute altogether on the 5th, bringing about its collapse.
Later in that same year, 1844, Burn took Bryce into partnership, partly because Bryce was now attracting commissions in his own right and partly because the travelling required for Burn's major English and Irish houses was severely eroding the time he could devote to his Scottish clients. Still in that same year Burn moved his house and office to 6 Stratton Street, Piccadilly, in London as a convenient address for dealing with his English and Irish clients and for his grander Scottish ones during the winter season. The partnership agreement would seem to have been that Bryce would manage all Scottish business from Burn's house at 131 George Street into which Bryce moved following Burn's departure.
Within the year the partnership became strained as a result of problems with the slating of the ducal Episcopal chapel at Dalkeith where the Duchess's enmity made Burn particularly sensitive of his reputation. Distance and travel being what it then was, Bryce was soon dealing directly with most of the Scottish clients and designing the Scottish commissions with relatively little reference to Burn in London. But inevitably some of the grander clients preferred to deal directly with Burn and the breaking point came in 1849 when Burn accepted the commission for Poltalloch and supervised it from the London office. At the time the break suited the interest of both partners. Burn was now relatively short of commissions for completely new houses in England and Ireland while Bryce's Edinburgh practice was now busier than Burn's in London with three bank head offices to its credit and a country house clientele which had traded up from medium size houses to the giant Inchdairnie in which Bryce's Scottish baronial idiom achieved maturity, setting the pattern for the still bolder houses of the 1850s and 1860s.
The partnership of Burn and Bryce ended formally by 11 July 1850 when Burn wrote to his publisher John Blackwood: 'I have closed my partnership with Bryce it being utterly impossible to go on with him'. Burn's letter to Blackwood does not give any further reason, but there may have been others beyond Dalkeith chapel and Poltalloch. Bryce had become a friend of Robert William Billings, whose 'Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland' had been initiated with an advance of £1000 from Burn. In October 1848 Burn withdrew his capital following a dispute over the commissioning of John Hill Burton to write the text. Originally the book was published in their joint names but thereafter his name was dropped, a move to which Burn objected. Billings publicised the dispute in an unflattering note to the next printing. It is also possible that Bryce's still more public dispute with Edinburgh Town Council caused Burn some concern. In May 1848 agreement had been reached with the North British Railway on the removal of Trinity College Church which was a burgh church. The Lord Provost, the publisher Adam Black, commissioned Burn and Bryce to buy the stones and rebuild the church on Calton Hill in October, superseding proposals by David Rhind for the replacement church ordered by the Sheriff. The stones were numbered and the church comprehensively photographed, perhaps Bryce's first acquaintance with photography. Black's commission brought Bryce into conflict not only with Rhind but with the Free Church faction in the Town Council which had no wish to rebuild the church. Accusations of unprofessional conduct flew and despite Bryce's stout defence the firm briefly suffered some reputational damage. Bryce never succeeded in rebuilding the church, but his project watercolours featured prominently in the RSA of 1851.
Because of Burn's opposition to the work of the practice being published or publicly shown, Trinity College Church was Bryce's first exhibit . Very exceptionally he was elected ARSA in the same year, the Academy, probably taking into account the sheer excellence of his newly completed Roman Corinthian British Linen Bank in St Andrews Square completed in that same year. Once elected he became an enthusiastic supporter of the Academy exhibiting giant watercolours of his bank and country house projects every year thereafter with the single exception of 1854. He was elected full academician in 1856 and admitted FRSE in the same year. Appointment as Grand Architect to the Masonic Grand Lodge of Scotland followed in 1860 and in 1865 the Earl of Dalhousie and of Wemyss and March proposed him for membership of the New Club, then almost exclusively the preserve of the nobility and greater landed and legal gentry, but the waiting list being what it was it was not until 1871 that he was admitted.
There is no record of Bryce's having travelled although the excellence of the late French gothic detailing of Fettes College, a commission taken over from Playfair who had died in 1857, suggests that by that date, 1862, he had first hand knowledge of original sources rather than simply borrowing from the publications of Clutton, Berty, Petit and Sauvageot, all of which he had in his library. Like his pupil Kinnear his was a co-founder of the Photographic Society of Scotland in 1856 and he may have taken a Kinnear camera on his travels. Although it could have been obtained from the building journals rather than at first hand, contemporary French influence from Visconti's New Louvre was markedly evident in some of the detail, though not the overall profile, of his 1864-70 reconstruction of the Bank of Scotland on the Mound.
The Bank was a commission Bryce had recovered from Peddie & Kinnear in circumstances which must have caused some embarrassment although his friendship with Kinnear seems to have survived. In 1854 Bryce had prepared sketch plans for an even more monumental scheme with a high level colonnade overlooking Princes Street for Alexander Blair, the bank's treasurer. This proved too expensive for the cautious Blair, particularly so after the crisis of 1857 when the Western Bank failed. In 1858-60 Blair commissioned several less expensive sketch proposals from Kinnear and after Blair died, his successor John Mackenzie, apparently unaware of Bryce's earlier involvement, instructed Peddie & Kinnear to seek Bryce's opinion on them. Bryce avoided any criticism of Kinnear's schemes by requesting Kinnear to ask the Bank to consult him directly, but concurrently he took steps to recover the commission probably with the support of the Bank's governor, his client the Earl of Dalhousie. While there is no record of any formal decision the matter seems to have been settled by an agreement that Bryce would design the head office and the New Town branch in George Street - which was not built in Bryce's life-time - and that Kinnear would be commissioned for the provincial banks.
Bryce's middle years were beset with continuing family problems and responsibilities. His brother William's family had grown up and his son David Bryce (junior) had left to set up practice on his own account by 1852, his architecture being very similar to his uncle's. But Bryce's sister Ann who had married into the Lawrence family, Bryce's quantity surveyors, had also died early and Bryce seems to have made himself responsible for her family; and on 31 August 1851 his brother John died and he found himself wholly responsible for the upbringing of nephews and nieces for a second time. Sometime before 1841 Bryce had a natural son of his own, also named David Bryce, who was brought up separately by his mother Janet Tod and a foster-mother and was provided for in a will made in 1852. Janet Tod lived with her solicitor brother at a respectable Gilmore Place address and the reasons why Bryce did not marry the mother are unknown. Bryce's own household at 131 George Street was managed by a cousin on his mother's side, Jane Todd, in later years with the assistance of his niece, John's elder daughter, Jessie. A seaside house was maintained at Portobello, probably to keep the nephews and nieces out of the office as far as possible, and when he died it was willed to John and Jessie jointly.
In or about 1870 Bryce slipped on a frozen-over platform at Cargill Station when returning from an inspection of the work at Meikleour House. He broke a leg and never fully recovered becoming subject to recurrent bronchitis. It was probably due to frequent indisposition that Bryce took Robert Rowand Anderson into partnership in 1873, with his brother John's son, John Bryce (junior) joining the partnership a little later in the same year. However at that stage in his career Anderson was primarily a church architect and incompatibility brought about its dissolution within a year. Bryce remained in partnership with John Bryce (junior), the partnership title becoming David & John Bryce.
David Bryce died at 131 George Street on 5 August 1876 after a six-day illness of bladder and bronchial problems and was buried at New Calton Cemetery. He left what was then a very substantial sum of £37,973 3s 6d and considerable heritable property. His natural son David Bryce Tod tried but failed to have David Bryce's will amended to accept him as the legitimated son and heir. Whether or not Janet Tod was a cousin (the spelling of Tod is different from his mother's family) has not yet been proved. David Bryce Tod lived in Worcester and then ran a coach-building business in Bishop Auckland, where he and his wife, Annie, raised a family of 11 children. In his last years he returned to Scotland with his wife and daughter and they ran a Temperance Hotel in Aberlady.
Contemporaries described Bryce as forthright and 'somewhat rough in manner' although he must have been courteous enough to retain such an aristocratic clientele. Portraits and photographs show that he was a big man, left-handed, in earlier years at least with sandy hair, and is said to have preferred to work standing at an easel with his right arm behind his back returning to the design again and again until he was satisfied with it.
John Bryce retained the practice title of David & John Bryce after his uncle's death, completing the work in hand and running a generally similar practice until the early 1890s when business trailed off. He was admitted FRIBA on 13 January 1879, his proposers being Charles Barry (junior), Richard Armstrong (a former assistant) and Edmund Benjamin Ferrey. He retired in 1908 and died on 22 August 1922, leaving moveable estate of £34,831 19s 6d.
After 1908 the practice was continued by John's nephew John Bryce Brechin, son of John's sister Davida who had married Robert Miller Brechin, commission agent, and a member of the Brechin quantity surveying family. He did not join the RIBA and is not as yet recorded as having carried out any architectural work. His business was perhaps more surveyor than architect. He retired in 1928 when the practice was closed and the drawings dispersed. The large project watercolour drawings prepared for exhibition at the RSA were given to the RIAS which subsequently disposed of them: some are now at RCAHMS. The library, including the folio of 'Sketches of Scotch and Old English Ornament' was bought by an American, Joseph Gavarelli, who presented it to George Washington University at St Louis Missouri, in 1932. John Bryce Brechin died in retirement on 18 April 1941.