What I love most about Grand Designs isn’t the inevitable highs and lows of elaborate housebuilding, but how much I usually hate the resulting house. Presenter Kevin McCloud may gush about “steel cathedrals”, but often what I see is a costly modernist mess where a cosy dwelling might have been instead.
The first episode of the new 25th series is a fabulous example of this. It has one of the best couples the show has ever seen: passionate interior designer Sarah and her preternaturally ambitious architect husband Howard, who claims upfront: “Our perfect project is something that’s almost unimaginably difficult. That other people go: ‘No, that’s impossible.'”
They want to build a sort of supercharged houseboat on an estuary near Worthing with which they have fallen in love. They have sold their previous home and moved all three of their (nearly grown-up) children into a rental to pay for it. Turns out their idea is totally un-mortgageable.
It took three years to complete Howard and Sarah’s floating home (Photo: Rob Brown)The engineering, which involves prefabricated giant steel plates sandwiched between polystyrene to help the structure float (remember, it is being built on mud amidst a rising tide) is entirely “experimental”. Much of the build seems ad-hoc and strangely amateur.
Howard and Sarah are project managing themselves to cut costs; they buy their own crane and hire some under-qualified looking guy with a puppy dog enthusiasm to help who, incredibly, once lived on the condemned houseboat situated in this spot that they are now demolishing. We are shown a sweet picture of him as a baby on the boat.
But where are all the other many builders this job presumably needs? One of Howard and Sarah’s sons is helping out a bit to pay his father back for some money he had borrowed but there doesn’t ever seem to be quite enough professionals on site to make their dream house a reality.
Kevin McCloud likens the house to something from Star Wars (Photo: Rob Brown)They intend the build to take 18 months. But because they’re literally building on shifting sands (think scenes where they have a single hour to stick permanent moorings into the mud before the water encroaches, but soon realise they have put a beam the wrong way round), there’s probably even more heartache than in your usual Grand Designs experience.
After three years, there’s finally a dwelling on the water. A sort of houseboat. A really ugly one. “Like a floating warehouse,” murmurs one local. “Like Darth Vader’s boat house,” says McCloud, twirling his linen scarf with delight, later referring to a giant roof window as “like something out of a Star Wars episode”. I’m not sure McCloud has ever seen Star Wars, because the structure looks less like the Death Star and more like a forbidding naval vessel, a stark angry-looking thing with sharp corners and timber-clad, mirrored rooms that might have been designed by Travelodge.
McCloud raves about the clever multipurpose kitchen island/ping-pong table Howard has built, and the efficient foldout desk Sarah has made at her latest woodwork course (this couple are unstoppable) but I can’t help but think how uninviting it all looks. Even the much-anticipated rear deck overlooking the estuary is sparse and underwhelming.
The resulting house is sparse and underwhelming (Photo: Rob Brown)But the whole thing is still a joy to watch – Howard and Sarah have unfathomable amounts of patience and energy, and are so very pleased with the end (over-budget and delayed) result. Usually, Grand Designs couples are on the verge of divorce but these two look like they’ve just been on a romantic spa break, even if Sarah does admit they are “a little weary”.
They gaze adoringly at one another, insisting that the thrill of designing together far outweighs the stresses. They extoll the charms of living amongst birds and changing tides, and their enthusiasm is contagious. I might not want to live on an austere, experimental houseboat (“We probably won’t know whether it’s worked for another 10 years or so,” admits Howard), but I very much envy their madcap lust for life.
‘Grand Designs’ continues next Wednesday at 9pm on Channel 4
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