Grand Designs UK: Stress and a heart attack to follow on builder’s own project

REVIEW: Just how many Grand Designs projects are not finished when they go to air? The number must be high.

There are a few such builds in New Zealand we would like to see followed up, including the Marlborough Sounds holiday home for an English family that was abandoned during lockdown, and Craig Jarvis’s off-grid DIY project at Taylors Mistake, Christchurch.

They are not always unfinished due to financial problems, but this week Grand Designs UK revisits one especially stressful project that went way over budget. Builder Paul and his wife Carol were building a sustainable, timber, fortress-like, five-bedroom home in Bolton, on the edge of the “blustery Pennine moors”.

I don’t recall seeing the original show in New Zealand, but running out of money wasn’t the only thing that happened as we find out when presenter Kevin McCloud returns. Paul had a heart attack a couple of years later. His wife blames it on the stress of the build.

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But first McCloud gives us a synopsis of what happened. Paul was more used to building with bricks and mortar, but he and Carol wanted to do an eco build, creating a home that would be a legacy for the family – a swansong for Paul who was looking at retirement. It was the biggest project he had ever undertaken.

They wanted it to look as though it had been there a long time, a house that would “settle into the ground”. Nothing would be prefabricated, and the house would have complex timber framing, all measured, cut and fixed together on site (with infill insulation and cladding made from recycled yoghurt pots and the like). But Paul still wanted to use masonry for the cladding on the lower level – presumably to give it that sense of permanence.

A green roof and photovoltaic panels were planned, plus an airtight interior (with mechanical ventilation), plus a couple of large decks out either side. Although the huge size of the house, 400m², was hardly a sustainable choice.

Pouring money into a hole in the ground

They budgeted a figure plucked out of air – £350,000 (NZ$720,000), with the build to be completed in 15 months. That included enormous excavation work (£100,000), so the house would sit lower in the landscape. Paul even said he felt like he was pouring money into a hole in the ground, which was literally what he was doing.

But, yes, you guessed it, there were cost overruns. They had to put their existing house on the market (it seems like they had been going to keep it.)

The house didn’t sell; they were refused a loan by the bank, and work on the build stopped. “I wake up in the night and think about what we could be doing, what could be happening; what stage we could be at if the money was there,” Paul said.

Hindsight is all very well, but if this build had been half the size at 200m² (still a big house by anyone’s standards), this would not have happened. The doomed lighthouse build in Devon is another example of an overly ambitious project.

When McCloud turned up for the first reveal things had improved. Somewhere they had found some money. They said they were “nearly there”, but there were a lot of unfinished details, including a half-finished stair. And the couple looked utterly exhausted.

What are the benefits of building so big?

Now, six years on, McCloud is back to see how it was supposed to look. The green roof helps it nestle into the green landscape as planned, and there are balconies.

It’s still a hefty fortress, a modern castle in a field, and pretty impressive. Their living floor is upstairs, to maximise the view, which is great. But the living area is vast, and not particularly cosy. And that wide hallway is a massive 30m long. But the extra space is great for the grandchildren.

Paul says the building experience was both “traumatic” and “a very pleasurable experience”. (Perhaps the happy days outnumbered the bad ones.)

Lessons learned? Paul wouldn’t put a balcony roof over a bedroom as it’s “asking for trouble”. The slightest split in the roofing membrane (on the deck) means water gets inside. The solar panels are proving their worth, however. Their power bills are very small.

The overall cost for the build was around £550,000 (NZ$1.13m), but they say it was good value.

Paul tells us about the heart attack he suffered – he had two stents put in. He now feels great and wants to keep building. Carol is convinced the stress of the build contributed to his heart attack and doesn’t want him doing this again.

Despite what Carol says, Paul really does have itchy feet to do it all again. Not sure who will win this argument.

McCloud gives himself the last word as usual, saying: “As my father said, there should always be in life, a list of things to do; there should always be another project.”

I couldn’t agree more. Although, hopefully, the next batch of Grand Designs owners (wherever they are) have learned about the potential perils of building on a massive scale, but what’s the betting they haven’t?

Just this past week, a Grand Designs UK owner who built a huge house in Essex (screened here last year) has listed his property and is looking to downsize – there was a lot of money tied up in that very big house for one person.

Yes, we can be sure there will be more great TV to come.