I think there's a lot to be learned from watching people build...
HE GRUNTS
..the remarkable homes that we've covered on Grand Designs
over the years.
So I would like to go back into the archive of Grand Designs
and explore, over 25 years, some of the wisdom about building
your own home.
Building your own house can be a real struggle.
It's a bit like going on an adventure without a map
or a compass.
It's nearly always an epic journey, and one that usually overruns
and costs you much, much more than you ever thought it would.
The desire to make a mark in the landscape,
to leave something behind, and many people...
..spend years digging and delving and constructing.
Do not expect an easy ride.
You need to be born without fear.
And...
In the end, will it look any good?
Sounds like a bloody nightmare to me.
Hello! Well, this is a milestone.
Grand Designs is 25 years old this year,
and, in that time,
we've had the fortune to witness the building of some of the most
remarkable homes in the United Kingdom.
Now, some are dreamy, slick and velvety smooth creations.
Others are crafted to sweet perfection.
Quite a lot are nutty, frankly.
Personally, I love a slice of fruit cake, white iced modernism.
Yum. Pretty well all of them, however,
have been at the leading edge of design, or of construction,
and we're going to look at the best of the best.
As the architect Mies van der Rohe said, "Less is more."
Actually, when it comes to cakes, more is more, right?
Aw... I'll go there. Yes!
I've looked through the hundreds of projects we filmed
over the last 25 years...
Oh, gosh!
Oh, dear.
Is this it?
..and a number of themes emerge.
Oh, shit! So we'll see some of the hardest...
Pain in the arse.
..and the most life-changing project.
It's just turned into an enormous, great family.
How beautiful.
We'll also celebrate the quickest...
I'll come back at 4:00 this afternoon,
it'll be a finished house.
..and the longest.
When do you think you'll be in? About ten years.
That's nice!
We'll look at the biggest...
Mother of the gods of construction!
..and the smallest projects.
9.5 x 4.
That's, erm...small.
We'll also look at the weirdest places people have chosen to build.
Oh, my God.
It looks horrific.
I wasn't thinking I was going to be living in a cave.
But first we'll be looking at the most experimental projects.
Wait. Oh! THEY GASP
Ooh!
So I think there's enough vinegar in there.
Please be warned. Don't try this at home.
Bicarb... If I squeeze the cork in, that should do it.
The thing about experimentation
is that you don't really know what the outcome is going
to be, do you? I mean, that's the whole point of experiments.
That's what they're for.
They're for scientific inquiry,
to discover just how provable
a theory might be. You know?
FIREWORK SCREECHES Bloody hell!
Monty in Peckham was a true Grand Designs experimenter.
He was an actor and film-maker in love with inventing things.
The helicopter training device.
So you can train to fly the real machine using a model.
His dad's Hampshire home was a dumping ground
for past experiments.
This is a spinning summerhouse.
Shopping trolley wheels
and a trailer axle.
But his powers of invention were tested to the limit
when he had to build a house for himself and his wife, Clare,
on a site so tightly hemmed in it couldn't have windows
down the side.
It's one of the things I want to prove with this project,
that you can take shitty little urban spaces and make special
houses with them if you're prepared to broaden your horizons a bit.
So Monty decided to experiment by designing a sliding glass roof
to let the light in.
Today is the day the glass gets craned in.
I brought my overalls so I can offer my services as a labourer.
He needed first to invent a sliding mechanism.
So this whole stainless steel frame slides across?
On balls. On these. Drifts.
This is what he does.
He's in his element, isn't he?
To speed up his project, Monty took the risky step of ordering his glass
from just the drawings.
The plan now is to lift up through the hole.
Normally you'd build the frame, measure it,
and then order the glass.
Monty, stop it!
Are you happy that the steelwork is absolutely as it should be?
You're scaremongering. You're scaremongering.
No, no, no. It will fit. I'm just keen to know that it will fit.
Yeah. So am I.
It needs to tilt back. We need some instructions for the crane driver.
We nearly lost a piece.
I can't let it go, cos it's going to swing and smash.
19 years later, his approach still seems as risk-laden as ever.
So, looking back at Monty's project, which was a long while ago...
OK, hold it there, please, Roger.
..I remember watching him in admiration of his skills
as an engineer and as a maker,
and can handle materials and engineer solutions
and do the maths at the same time.
That, to me, is magical to watch.
Right. Down again.
Beautiful. Ay!
APPLAUSE Hey-hey! Thank you, Kevin.
That was a magical experience.
When that roof slid open, it became a cloister.
It introduces so much more light.
The piece of glass I'm lying on is six millimetres thick.
So we did this piece to camera.
We had an assistant pushing the window shut with a big stick.
You couldn't see him because he was out of shot, so it felt
a little bit more hairy.
But it is toughened, which means it's very, very strong.
Health and safety in 2005 was not what it is today.
But worth doing, eh?
Hello. Hey. Hello.
The finished house was magical.
Good lord!
It was as wild and experimental as the process of building it.
So what we have here is a light fitting, for instance.
So you turn on here LEDs, which also doubles
up as a shower.
And what a lovely thing.
And that just drains straight onto the floor and away underneath.
Just sort of a wet bedroom.
It's been 19 years since Monty first finished his home.
His son Flint has grown up here.
It's given him a different perspective on what a home is.
Yeah, I'd always find it so strange going into other people's houses,
because growing up in a house like this, I'd be so confused
that they had an entire room for a bath because you could just put
it under your bed.
Monty's not stopped experimenting either.
He recently designed this.
HE SIGHS
A moment of peace.
I had my dad at home for his palliative care,
and that process is really undignified and not very hygienic.
And I thought, "What I need to do here is to have a loo in the room,
"but not one that you see."
So I decided to fold it into a box.
Space saving devices like this can transform the way we think
about configuring our homes.
Projects like this change our perception of how we build.
People like Monty, pioneers, are essential.
Without them, there would be no progress.
I bet the common factor with Grand Designs contributors
is they're all quite naive,
they're all quite, as I've been called, delusionally optimistic.
Because you're trying to stretch beyond something that's normal.
That's why you're doing a grand design, and it's just extraordinary
to have that journey.
What more could you want?
With any construction project, experimental or otherwise,
there is always complicated engineering...
Good grief.
..and involved ideas that need to be understood.
To explain it, I'm a big fan of models,
mostly involving food.
My mother used to make a pudding called abricot suedois.
Imagine that this jelly has got insulating material in it.
Represented here by an ice cream wafer, which I think
is a fairly representative model.
On top of that, you add more layers of meringue.
It is a real caramel shortbread conundrum.
They are not, however, designed to be stacked like this,
which could just then crush
and collapse.
It has the structural integrity of, well, toast.
That's what happens.
Think of these little pink wafers as building blocks.
Look, it's a floor!
And it's so strong you could dance across it.
There you go.
Staying with the theme of experimental homes, one of the most
extraordinary houses I've ever visited was in Kent.
Good morning. Good morning.
The brave pioneers building it were an architect, Richard,
and an investment manager, Sophie.
They started in 2007, with a plan to replace a tired old cottage
with something far more radical.
Well, the form of it is an arch.
The bottom of the arch will be sort of here.
You're going to live under an arch? Yes.
Richard was building a timbrel vault, a type of self-supporting
curved arch that likely was first used in Spain in the 14th century.
Many timbrel vaults were built in masonry.
Richard was determined to use tiles, though, stuck together
with plaster of Paris.
I mean, that sounds like an act of lunacy.
When you start these things and you're building
it without really solid centring, you think,
"I hope the engineers have got this all right."
Do you know, there are 25,000 of these tiles
going up onto that roof, each of them made by hand, each
of them made here.
And that is an extraordinary number of tiny little components of pieces
of baked clay.
It was one giant experiment,
so Richard started off by making a model.
Ready? If this goes, it's going to really hurt.
You know that, don't you? Yeah. One, two, three. Go.
There we are.
Voila.
HE SCREECHES
In fact, I haven't even got the lighter weight on my other foot,
really. I've got it on my left foot, mainly.
High five! Phew!
Richard couldn't resist seeing if it could take an uneven load.
Oh! THEY GASP
THEY LAUGH
What did I say?
Richard and his team spent weeks building the arch
with painstaking care.
They got as far as glazing, but then disaster struck.
I'm making a technical model of the average Beano Homes
timber framed house.
I remember we were doing a little piece to camera,
we were working with the model, some tape and a box to sort of talk
about air tightness.
And there's this terrible noise, this great crash.
CRASHING
And we all knew something had happened.
And this guy had gone through it.
He'd fallen onto some staging beneath.
In the end, he was bruised and not seriously injured.
My first concern was make sure everyone's all right.
The rest of the structure is absolutely fine,
but where it's single layer, it's got no strength at all.
A bit like when you perversely tried to put your foot on that arch
that we made and I thought, "What's he doing? He knows it's..."
But you, for some reason, I think you just felt
that it was going to support your weight. Well, it's
a kind of, I don't know, misplaced confidence.
Lucky escape.
But they did manage to repair it.
The finished result of the experiment
was something completely extraordinary.
It's rearing out of the ground, like a bridge or something.
It's a magnificent looking building.
The reality is much better than I'd imagined.
If I'd stayed in my comfort zone and then looked back
at what I'd created, would it inspire me?
I don't think so.
To look back at this and be proud of the fact that I had the courage
to do it,
I love that. That will give me memories that will last forever.
Richard and Sophie's house remains one of the most distinctive homes
in 25 years of Grand Designs.
If you think about where you might like to build,
you might choose, I don't know, a bustling street,
the magic of the suburbs,
a beautiful rural location, I don't know,
by the sea somewhere, but Grand Designers are a breed apart.
Where they choose to build can be sometimes as odd
and as thrilling as the houses themselves.
I've known people build on airfields...
He keeps flying past the window.
It's very amusing.
..on piers, over the sea...
The obvious question is, why?
..up mountains...
You can see miles, can't you? You can see a long way from here, yeah.
..into cliffs.
This is our bedroom. It looks terribly dark and poky.
There's just black.
..and near graveyards.
I shall walk around with my lantern, candle lit.
But there's one sight that, to me, is stranger than all of those.
For Angelo in the Wyre Forest, his perfect site was a cave...
Oh, wow.
..which came to him almost miraculously.
Literally opened the local property supplement and it just fell open,
and there, the centre page...
You don't open a property supplement and find a cave!
No. That's exactly what happened.
So these rock houses in the local area are said to be the oldest
inhabited rock houses in the whole of Europe.
I volunteered to help him make a wardrobe.
It gives a whole new meaning to the word 'built-in'.
The red sandstone here is from when dinosaurs
roamed the earth.
Great fun, isn't it?
Er, yeah. Beats checking your emails, anyway.
So I was pretty excited to put my overalls on and join Angelo.
I thought it would be fun and I thought I'd have an enjoyable
time chiselling away at stone, you know?
But this wasn't stone as I knew it.
This was like steel.
It was hardened rock.
It's remarkable that human beings actually manage to construct
anything, because most of us would just give up.
There was also the question of why do it in the first place?
Italy, where Angelo's family is from, has a rich tradition
and history of living in beautifully crafted caves, primitive
or luxurious.
Although in the UK...
It is a damp Monday morning.
I can quite understand why you would want to live in a cave
when it's 30 or 35 degrees outside, but here, in the soft Worcestershire
rain, I'm not so sure.
But thousands of hours of work, 300 barrel loads of rubble and nine
months later, an eccentric idea suddenly started to make sense.
It's delightful, isn't it?
Fred Flintstone would be very happy here.
Limewash was a bit of a labour of love, but it does look good.
And I like to see the kind of texture of the stone coming through.
A bit of contemporary luxury combined with a bit of primitive
man cave convenience.
20th century toilet paper, however. HE LAUGHS
Angelo's story was over 130 episodes in to Grand Designs.
But now I'd like to go back in time,
way, way back through to the house that started it all off.
This is the house featured in the first episode of series one
of Grand Designs.
It's in New Haven in East Sussex, and it was built by Tim and Jules,
who constructed it on the edge of a cliff.
This project also introduced us to an idea
that we have been grappling with for 25 years -
the continuing struggle between how long people think
a project is going to take and how long it actually does take.
Tim was a hang gliding and paragliding instructor,
and his partner Jules ran the office.
Their vision was for a timber clad seaside home with panoramic windows.
So what's the deadline?
It's the bump line, no?
It's the bump line. It's about here.
When's it due? Early June.
And what happens if the house is not ready?
Is that going to matter to you? Well, it does to me.
There isn't any reason at this stage why that shouldn't be so.
No sooner had they started than Tim and Jules were hit by their first
problems on site.
All the work they've done this morning in the middle there
has got to be redone, so it's a bit of a blow.
Then the windows didn't fit and their builder had to step
in to save the day.
And it's due tomorrow. Ah!
Ready to go! Tomorrow, tomorrow.
So it's not going to be born here?
There's still hope. There's still hope.
There's tonight. And there may be tomorrow.
Though eventually, of course, the house did get finished.
Oh, yeah. Look at this.
It's wonderful.
It's one big living space.
Do you have a posh room in this house? Yeah.
You're standing in it. THEY LAUGH
The kitchen!
25 years later...
Ah! How are you?
..Tim and Jules are still enjoying their house
as much as they did when they first moved in.
It's worked out beyond our wildest hopes, and the kids
have all thrived.
We know how lucky we've been and we hope the show goes on.
We hope to see you in 25 years' time.
Oh, I'd love that. That would be... I would be 90.
In another life. We might still be going!
The house will still be here. Yeah.
THEY LAUGH
Tim and Jules were lucky that the problems they faced
when they were building weren't greater.
That suggests you come down now.
Many Grand Designers after them have had to deal with much worse.
Oh! Not that wall!
Plasterboard ceiling landed on the floor.
It sounded like a herd of elephants.
Just boom!
Ah, you're coming home with us!
That is big.
Oh, Christ. What the BLEEP have I done?
Well, you've trashed the garden. You put a bloody great black lump in it.
Agh! Agh, you...!
It's weeing, isn't it?
It's just a mess. It really is.
It's the great motto for building in Britain, isn't it?
Put a roof on first.
I'm just a bit disappointed with the quality.
I mean, it's like a badger's backside.
Derek, will you come and explain something to me
that I don't understand?
I will make an attempt to.
On the right-hand side, there's a pillar and the roof
is just sliced off. It doesn't look as though
the roof's going out to join it. What's going to happen there?
Oh, that's so easy to explain away. It was built by mistake.
The Grand Designers who have wished for a speedy project and got one
are few and far between, but they do exist.
But not because they fervently wish it to happen, nor
because they're lucky, but because they actively build
in a mechanism into their project to deliver speed.
Fifth gear! Ha-ha! HE RINGS BELL
Bye!
Rob and Kate in Tunbridge Wells hold the record for one of the fastest
houses ever built on Grand Designs.
They decided to go for a super organised,
very carefully managed method of construction,
having it made in pieces off site
and then delivered and put up.
There's a lot of things in our life that we've not been able to control,
and I think that's possibly why we've done the project the way
we're doing it.
The type of house they'd chosen meant it was going to take hardly
any time at all to go up.
In theory, we should be in sort of by Christmas,
or if not just after.
So, a few months. Bingo.
SHE LAUGHS
The house itself was made in a factory in six giant modules.
Each piece needed only 12 days on the production line.
It took two months to make the lot.
I love watching this.
I love watching this because there's no mud.
Making it, though, was the easy bit.
What would be the biggest problem? Transport.
Literally getting to site would be the biggest problem.
Ha-ha-ha! Oh, look!
It's going very slowly, but that's because it's so wide.
But width wasn't the real problem here.
Oh, shit.
I measured that wrong.
Even the problems here were solved quickly.
The structure went up in 24 hours and the rooms were plumbed, wired
and decorated over a few months.
Oh, yeah.
Wow!
This is amazing.
What I wasn't expecting was that it would actually look so good.
A proper bit of architecture. Yeah. Thank you.
It is almost like a work of art.
It's quite sculptural. Mm. Yeah.
So how long was it all in all, then?
Five months almost to the day.
From moving out to moving back in? Yeah, not long at all.
It just makes me so happy.
And seeing Kate happy as well.
It's here and we just kind of grow old with it. Yeah.
Kate and Rob's project was almost ridiculously fast, but there again,
there are those projects at the opposite end of the scale
where progress seems glacial and our coverage of events takes not
months, but years.
I mean, decades sometimes.
In 2007, Ed and Rowena in Herefordshire embarked
on the longest ever Grand Designs project.
They lived off the land with goats for milk, chickens for eggs,
and sheep for wool.
Having so much to do outside is
hugely important for the children.
The jobs have to be done.
It doesn't matter whether it's beautiful sunshine
or pouring with rain.
I think they have a really good grounding in the things
which I suppose Ed and I put a value on,
which is your home and feeding yourself.
With just £100,000,
they wanted to build an extraordinary hand-crafted home
on their land.
They decided to do it themselves with no previous experience
of house building.
There's a long period of time of me staring at figures in here,
trying to figure out how one thing connects to another.
They didn't have a specific schedule either.
It might be that we don't finish for another five years,
but it's all part of life, isn't it?
Five years was optimistic.
In 2013, six years after they started building,
they had a house they could only just about move into.
I've got my big kitchen and I will have a larder
and I will have a veranda...
..when that end is done.
Ed, who'd learned most of his skills building his home,
actually made the kitchen himself.
Incredibly, he ended up spending just a few hundred quid.
It does go to show you don't need to spend a huge
amount on kitchens.
The kitchen is a very expensive-looking kitchen.
A lesson thoroughly ignored by some Grand Designers.
How much was this?
Well, it's probably the most expensive piece in the chalet.
This was £34,000. Good God!
I think it was 100 and... About 125 grand.
What...? What?
Where...? Where's the money gone?
I think the design and the detail.
It's huge! Look at the knobs.
What is this material, Claire?
Dekton. What? Dekton. What?
I mean, you just have to look at, you know, the seamlessness of,
you know, no handles.
Oh, yeah. You pay a lot for no handles, don't you?
This is a kitchen which has come from another universe.
This, I recognise, is a sink.
What's this thing? This is the frying pan.
You're joking. Yeah.
And then we've got our extractor fan.
The death ray extractor.
This is the kind of thing you find in The Savoy, in the kitchens there.
Well, that's true. It is there, actually.
All mod cons. Very expensive.
You can't go and put some nasty, rubbish tat in here, can you?
Is £125,000 on a kitchen, Claire, justifiable?
I mean, it looks amazing.
By 2017, ten years into Ed and Rowena's project,
there was what looked like a finished house.
Hello. Hello! How extraordinary.
The time it had taken to build had been well spent,
beautifully crafting every detail.
Every joint is covered by a little boss,
but the boss is like a timber wrap, a timber rope.
Yeah, we thought they looked like ribbons.
I'm overwhelmed by this.
I'd never been in a building like it.
But the time it took
to build the project did have other consequences.
Tell me, up here, how many have you got?
One, two, three bedrooms there.
The youngest is now 17.
So it's not long before you find yourself with quite a lot
of empty bedrooms quite a lot of the time.
Has this happened too late? No.
The experience of them growing up and it all happening around them,
I think, is incredibly valuable.
And, even now, they're still tweaking it.
That's the sitting room in there, Kevin.
But at the moment it is...
Yes, I see. ..the workshop.
To be honest, I'm not sure they're ever going to stop.
I was going to ask you, you know,
what happens when the project's finished,
but, first of all, I don't think it's going to be
ever completely finished.
And secondly...
What's the confines of the project, as well?
It's the grand universal project of life, isn't it?
Maybe it is.
17 years and counting.
That is the very definition of time well spent.
The brave souls on Grand Designs are self-builders.
They are, I think, all-in kinds of people.
By which I mean that they will pour everything into one single idea,
this idea of building a home in their own image.
They're invested fully, emotionally, financially.
And that, of course, raises the stakes
and it makes their journey all the more powerful.
It's one of the nicest homes I've ever, ever been in, I think.
You're being too nice about the building. Sorry.
That's all right.
Sorry!
The pair of you!
You'll get me crying in a minute.
We're going to enjoy it.
And I've grafted.
You really have.
This is our forever home.
Well, you've done it, mate.
We've done it, kid, haven't we?
You seem quite, both of you,
quite emotional about it.
OK? Mm.
I've never cared about a building more than the mill.
We just want to do right by her, guarantee a future.
The journey to build can be emotional,
but the effects of some Grand Designs projects
can be life-changing.
One of the most powerful projects I've visited in the last 25 years
is the Hedgehog Co-operative in Brighton.
They don't want to build just houses,
they want to build a community.
A group of ten households with little money,
who'd really struggled to get stable homes to live in,
came together to help build each other's.
It's great that we're going to be living next door to each other.
What's even greater is that they're all our best friends now.
It's just turned into an enormous great family.
These ten households built an entire street with their bare hands.
It was a street which changed lives.
It was the brainchild of Paul Crouch and his partner, Jennie.
I think originally it was the realisation that the way
that I'd been living was quite insecure.
I'd been living on the road as a traveller,
and I had a two-year-old daughter,
and the gradual realisation that as she grew up,
she was going to have a lot less opportunity, I think, in life,
because of the way that I was living.
Everyone had to put in 30 hours a week of work on site
or risk losing their home.
It was a struggle that meant sacrifice.
Paul was forced to give up his cherished Land Rover.
It's very important to have a Land Rover to tow my caravan,
so I spent all my time and effort and money and love
and all sorts of things on this vehicle.
The time has come to sell it,
through being extremely broke, which is a bit of a problem,
mostly to do with the fact that you can't really have
a full-time job and build a house for 30 hours a week.
So, as a family, we've become very poor over the last year
and a half and that's where it's come to now,
selling your possessions to keep yourself going till the end
of the build.
But Paul did keep going,
and he did manage to get to the end of the project.
And when I came back 13 years later...
Wow. How beautiful.
..it had worked out incredibly well.
How many of the households that moved in are still
in those same houses?
All of them. Yeah?
You would be utterly crazy to leave here.
KEVIN CHUCKLES
All of the children in the community here have benefited from the efforts
of Paul and the other adults.
It's just wonderful to think that our parents, like,
put that much hard work in and they, like, built our, you know,
future of living here and everything.
My experience here has been amazing.
And if my kids could have the same thing, it would just be great.
Brighton is a self-built community with a shared vision,
but, unfortunately, what's emotionally positive
for the self-builder can be quite the opposite for the neighbours.
It's on the route for my dog walk every day.
Stone cladding, it just looks ugly.
It's wrong. It is wrong.
A rusty metal build.
It doesn't... It doesn't even sound right.
Ugly, in one word.
There's not a lot I or anybody else can do, but I'm disappointed,
I'm angry and very sad that that's been built
and will be there forever.
It is so out of character.
I really am upset about it.
I hope it floods on them.
You'd like to see more contemporary architecture on the riverfront?
Oh, God. Yes, of course.
My next project is to knock the neighbours' houses down.
Is it?
The impact of a building can most obviously be felt
among human beings,
the way that it makes people feel who use it,
the way that it interacts with people who might live in the neighbourhood,
who have to live with it.
But there's also, of course, the environmental impact.
And given that nearly 40% of Britain's greenhouse gases
come from our homes,
it's a good thing that so many Grand Designs projects
have been ahead of the curve.
Many Grand Designs homes are super high-tech eco.
Duncan and Liz, in the north Cotswolds,
clad their roof with glass and metal solar tiles
to create a home that produced four times more energy than it used.
It has negative running costs.
It pays us to live in it.
Over the year, we should be able to power
around four three-bedroom houses.
Andrew and Margretta used the earth around their house as a battery
to store heat to keep it warm over winter.
This whole wall and the 500 tonnes of earth behind it
is, you know, steadily growing in temperature.
It's really warm in here and it is quite remarkable, actually.
Ed and Vicky in South Somerset used a precision-engineered wind turbine
in their drive to build a completely off-grid house.
The house is looking absolutely brilliant,
and the thing is capped by that great emblem of self-sufficiency.
Yeah. The wind turbine.
Your kind of statement of faith,
in alternative technology.
But one of the greatest eco projects I visited was super low tech.
It was Ben Law's home in the woods.
This is very beautiful, Ben.
Yeah, it's a magical spot. It is.
He was a forester who lived outdoors and decided that it was finally time
to build himself a permanent home.
I've been up here ten years, living under canvas.
I certainly never planned on living under canvas forever.
From the woods around him, he made a cruck frame using whole trunks
of naturally curving timber to support his building.
We'll try and put some human power behind the feet.
So eco was this project,
they didn't even use cranes to lift the frame up,
just people.
Yes!
Is it? It's spot on. Whoo!
Am I good or what?
It's literally... That is spot on.
Their home-made lifting system worked, until it didn't.
The second frame got jammed.
It's all a bit messy at the moment.
It's stable as it is, so it's time to have a little rethink,
I think, for a moment or two before we go any further.
They came up with a high-tech solution -
poke it with a ladder.
Yeah, keep going.
Yep, she'll do.
That's it. Then, time to put the kettle on.
Ben's was an eccentric project that drew to it
the most wonderfully eccentric people.
I remember it well.
# Biscuits and milk and a voice
# And a guitar as smooth as silk...cut. #
Biscuits and milk?Excellent. LAUGHTER
So the man with the guitar had a very important job
on Ben's project.
First of all, we used his music as incidental music in the film.
Isn't that lovely?
But his role on site was to entertain the troops.
That was his job.
He did absolutely no construction work whatsoever,
because his fingers were, of course, divine.
I've never been on a building site where,
instead of a health and safety officer,
you have a troubadour.
Some of the best Grand Designs projects
do have the most eccentric people behind them.
Paul, the alien, for the singing room.
It's got a cigar.
You're a man of interesting tastes.
Well, thank you.
This is where I have cocktails.
The sundeck, yeah.
Cocktails at six up here, very shortly.
He's quite eccentric.
We're having a crow's nest up the top,
so you get the view across the marsh.
It might be on hydraulics.
That tower is going to be a Jacuzzi.
You're joking. Absolutely serious.
It's the Scooby-Doo door!
It's a lifestyle sort of thing, really.
KEVIN LAUGHS It's brilliant!
I'd just like to light a fire under your bottom.
Fearless Grand Designs' eccentrics of the last 25 years, I salute you.
I declare the South Herefordshire Railway open.
LAUGHTER
This is part four.
You've been watching Susan and Michelangelo
for the last 36 minutes,
lovingly weaving a home out of spun hamster fur
and welded hempcrete.
They have no natural sources of light in their basement home,
so I bring them caged glow worms.
Ohh. HE CHUCKLES
Oh, I'm sorry.
I was just reading the Grand Designs Bot there.
Look, I'll start again.
This is part four.
Yeah? This is where we get to see the finished building, or a divorce.
This is where our audience numbers swell with enthusiasm
and the bosoms of our self-builders swell with pride.
This is the exciting bit!
This is where we get to see the completed project,
where we discover what the latest mode of transport is that
my director decides I'm going to arrive in, yeah?
But...there are limits.
Beautiful day for it, isn't it?
Oh, the house looks fantastic.
Magnificent.
Woohoo! That is the best view of the house.
Of course, how I arrive is not the most crucial factor
in a house's success.
Size is important in design.
As human beings, we like the scale of things to be proportionate
to their use.
Here we are.
But sometimes we want to make an impact.
We feel the need to make things bigger than they need to be.
I mean, much bigger. Vast, in fact.
I mean, magnificent, but useless.
There have been some epic houses on Grand Designs.
It is vast.
There's been the Hux Shard, a giant, jagged, rock-like house
sticking out of the ground.
It looks extraordinary.
Did it get out of hand? I'm not too sure.
I don't think I've ever seen a piece of glass that big.
It is amazing.
There's the water tower in Kennington.
What a jaw-dropping show stopper of a building.
Perhaps the tallest grand design ever.
Oh, my goodness me. What a view.
That's the whole of central London in one view.
But one of the largest homes we've ever featured on Grand Designs
has to be Clinton's.
Mind you, his previous home seemed pretty big to me.
How long have you owned this place?
Two... Nearly two years now.
Yeah, two years. That's not long to be somewhere
before you then decide to do it all over again.
I think it's a little bit squat.
I wanted it longer.
So, on a new plot of land in West Sussex,
Clinton set about building his epic vision.
Bloody Nora!
What box have you opened of Pandora's?
It does look big, I must say.
How long is it? 60m.
Good God, you're going to keep fit here, aren't you?
I think he's gone a bit large with it
to what he actually needs, but that's Clinton.
As the house went up, the scale of it was like nothing
I'd ever seen.
It's the size of a small housing estate.
I'm going to get a big five-metre couch here.
Who needs a five-metre couch?!
Well, it has to be to fill the space.
I'm going to have to put a big couch in here.
It's going to look silly otherwise.
What, and a five-metre-long TV?
No, I don't... No, no.
But, yeah, we have sort of pushed the boundaries, as it were.
When completed, walking into it was an experience
like no other.
It looks faultless.
Well, hello.
Congratulations.
I'm slightly awestruck by this.
The big question that still remains in my mind -
whether it is too big.
What do you think?
Well, the answer is, of course, yes, it is.
I mean, it's enormous.
I suppose my frustration with the project was that I thought
that Clinton really could achieve everything he needed
in a building a quarter of the size.
And that's what Joe and Lina in East London
managed to do beautifully.
Powerful big ideas can come in small packages.
But the value of a small project like Joe and Lina's
lies in how we can learn from them.
It's just really, really a light building.
The volume of the building isn't huge,
but where there's intricate storage and really clever design solutions
and a sense of space and a sense of connection.
It's everything we want, really.
Wow.
Oh!
You know, in life, as in yoga,
there are some things that are difficult, yeah.
And there are other things,
there are other things which are just anatomically impossible.
It's the same with self-build.
I mean, it will test the limits of your endurance,
it will test the limits of your bank balance,
and then it will extinguish all hope and kill all ambition,
and it'll probably tear a ligament as well.
I'm not doing that.
I'm really not doing that.
And that's not... I couldn't do that in 1999.
The most excruciating, difficult project in the whole
of Grand Designs' 25 year history is unquestionably in Devon...
You went further that time.
..where Hazel and Edward set about building a lighthouse home.
The thing is, you've got a perfectly good house here.
Why on earth would you want to knock this down
and build something else?
It's quite brutal.
They needed £1.8 million initially to build it,
which they intended to borrow before the bank pulled the loan.
My dad suddenly told us one of the banks said no
and we were, literally, we were so gutted.
And me and Nicole have been, like, trying to raise, like, some money
because... Yeah. We've been doing car boot sales and stuff,
but it's quite hard because, I mean, it rains a lot here.
Edward built another house on the plot to borrow against,
but then, when it came to starting the lighthouse,
he was hit by more expense.
The foundations cost him 1.2 million quid,
thanks to having to dig into super-hard rock.
Terrifying is an adjective that doesn't really sum it up,
if I'm honest.
Then he had to build a bridge from the road to the lighthouse,
which cost 80 grand.
Well, it's like a blinking RNLI slipway, this.
Sadly, seven years in, with the project still unfinished,
Edward and Hazel's marriage couldn't take the strain any more.
We parted company last year.
I put her through a horrendous time with this, you know,
knocking the family home down, not building another one.
I have to take it on the chin.
My ambition and vanity has probably collapsed the marriage,
so that's...that... I think that's probably the truth.
Eventually, Edward did finish.
It wasn't a home he'd ever get to live in, though,
as it was owned by a property development business.
But he had finished it.
Was it worth it? It's worth it because it's finished.
It would not have been worth it had it not been finished.
It would have been painful.
Yeah. Very painful.
Therefore, not an option. EDWARD CHUCKLES
Not an option, yeah.
Just getting to the finish line
and creating something of incredible beauty like this
is a remarkable achievement.
I never fail to be surprised by what Grand Designers
are capable of creating.
Holy reed beds!
Holy shards of glass!
If Darth Vader were to retire, move to Earth
and build himself a country house on his estate,
this is what it would look like.
It's like a concrete submarine,
which has breached the surface of a wild flower meadow.
The house is finished.
It's beautiful.
For 25 years, it's been my huge privilege and pleasure
to meet extraordinary people doing extraordinary things.
And from all walks of life, all different.
Different in tastes and agendas and budgets, of course,
and in hopes and dreams.
But all of them have chosen to do the same thing,
to open a door into this magical realm,
this realm of self-build,
which is full of cranes and mud and caravans and glass walls,
and, occasionally, a baby.
And Grand Designs, meanwhile,
has been there to record all of that,
to chart the energy, the creativity, the sheer bloody-mindedness needed
to build your own home.
So if you've enjoyed watching over that quarter century and more,
then I have one thing to say,
and that is that viewing doesn't quite convey the full experience.
If you want to understand what self-build is really like,
then I can only suggest you have a go yourself.
We're going to rebuild it as a family home.
I feel like my dad has big concept ideas
and it's proving to be a bit of a headache.
He's a very, very big risk taker.
To be fair, he's a nightmare.
Structurally, it's got to be more sound.
We've literally just stopped working on the site.
It's just a major, major cock-up.
When are you going to produce the detailed drawings?
Is it when it's finished?
Probably.
Oh!
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