The restoration of Old Greyfriars took twelve years. Initially, James Smith was appointed architect but was responsible for little more than removing the roof and demolishing the remaining arcades. In 1856 and 1857, David Cousin radically rebuilt Old Greyfriars. In the windows, he inserted ashlar pierced by "Early English" lancet lights. He created a simple, triangular gable at the east end with a new lancet of three lights between the top of the central window and the apex of the gable. The arcades were not reconstructed, leaving an open interior covered by a single-span timber ceiling beneath a steeply pitched roof. In its time, Cousin's restoration of Old Greyfriars was "acclaimed as a sign that Presbyterianism had admitted Art as a handmaid of religion". Around the time of the 1930s restoration, however, Andrew Landale Drummond would criticise the "effect of bleak though ornate ugliness". A re-ordering of Old Greyfriars' interior was undertaken by Herbert Honeyman in 1912.