According to research conducted by me, on the internet, this morning,
millennials are having a really tough time of it,
thanks to the rest of us.
I mean, they are always on their mobile phones, aren't they?
They want everything handed to them on a plate...
Thank you, Nikki.
They have a thing about avocado toast,
and they have a really poor work ethic.
Look, I think it's about time we put to rest
some of those misconceptions.
Tastes of soap.
Zara, Singapore-born and now 31,
is a professional make-up artist and social media influencer
who's lived in Reading since the age of 13.
I do all the New York Fashion Weeks,
London Fashion Week and Paris Fashion Week.
I do content creation as well,
where essentially I create make-up looks
and teach people how to become their own make-up artists.
Her partner is Giuliano, a 29-year-old gym-fanatic,
who's been Reading-based for the past six years
and has a whizz-bang job working for a global tech firm.
I travel and work with different clients,
you know, multiglobal corporations,
helping them on their journey to move to the cloud
and ultimately digitally transform their business.
In their spare time, these go-getters somehow also manage
to run a healthy snacks business.
Giuliano and I love to cook.
So I think that was a great common thing that we both had.
We work well together.
We are both pretty driven.
I think we always have been.
As driven people often do,
Giuliano and Zara have their sights set on the next challenge...
COW MOOS
..170 miles from Reading... I mean, it's really cool.
..In Lincolnshire.
You're walking into the living room.
I always had this dream of potentially building my own home.
The opportunity came up, we were able to find a bit of land.
They've made the move from Reading,
bought a one-acre plot, with planning,
to build a contemporary home and, naturally, they'll be sharing
their story with other self-builders on social media.
Moving to the countryside in a very remote village
isn't going to be for everybody. Yeah!
But, for us, it's absolutely perfect.
This exciting new chapter kicks off in earnest in early 2023,
as the foundations for their new home are dug.
Hello. Hello. I do like your site.
Thank you. What do your friends say when you say,
"We're moving to Lincolnshire"?
I think the first thing was, like, "Huh?"
Was this a long-term plan?
When we were locked up, during lockdown,
no outdoor space, we sort of craved, you know,
peace, quiet, outdoors, garden space.
And we thought, what's stopping us from making that move
to the next chapter of our lives now?
To raise a family, to really put down roots somewhere.
Yeah. And somewhere that we can actually call home.
So, you bought an oven-ready site, effectively?
So, just in a nutshell, what are you building?
There was a historical malthouse on the site in the 17th century.
Malthouse? Yes.
For making malt to make beer with? Exactly.
And so part of the approval is to reinstate that
historical context that was once here...
How interesting. ..in the form of a modern home.
We're trying to do our best to very delicately create character
without it becoming pastiche. Yeah.
Lots of strong, detailed brick buttressing.
Uniformed windows on the front.
But then on the rear is when we're allowed
to do more kind of modern, free-range architecture.
OK. And that's the south facing side. Exactly, yes.
It is going to look like a new building. Of course.
But, at the same time we want to pay homage and respect
to the history of the site, which I think is important. Nice, nice.
Talents in the worlds of make-up And tech these two may be,
but Giuliano and Zara have no experience of building anything.
What's to come, like their site, is new territory for them.
Maps from the 1800s show a malthouse building on the site.
Planning wanted the placing of Giuliano and Zara's
concrete foundations to mirror that.
Their project, designed by Lincs Design Consultancy,
will also smuggle in a new-built, modern home,
slotting it behind the camouflage of a traditional building.
And it's all off the scale.
Sizeable, pre-insulated timber panels made off-site will deliver
an energy efficient, two-storey, 400 square metre home.
The malthouse aesthetic will come from 25,000 handmade bricks,
some distinctive brick piers,
typical narrow windows and a slate roof.
And then, audaciously slicing through the malthouse,
a glass and Corten steel portal will connect
the front door to an oversized statement,
a giant 30 metre giant wooden pergola,
next to an equally large pond.
On one side of the hall will sit a large kitchen-diner
with a wall of glazing overlooking the garden.
At the far end of the house will be utility spaces and a garage.
And in the middle, the sitting room,
a triple-height space with an over-head walkway strung across it.
Upstairs, you'll find Giuliano and Zara's bedroom,
with an en-suite, a walk-in-wardrobe and a make-up studio for Zara.
Across the floating walkway,
Giuliano's office will overlook the sitting room.
Beyond it are two spare bedrooms for relatives to stay
and a family to grow.
And outside, there is more.
Beyond the pergola, there'll be a garden room,
a greenhouse, a fruit and veg patch and beehives.
This isn't just a new home,
it's a whole new world and way of life.
So Giuliano and Zara had better make sure
whoever builds it for them knows what they're doing.
I'll be project managing the overall process. And are you...
Do you bring experience of project management too?
Experience of project management,
but not specifically related to construction. Um...
Running a project in IT is clearly not the same
as putting a building up in the wet.
We've done our best to fix price all of the contracts.
OK. So there shouldn't be any fluctuation or surprises, hopefully.
So, the groundworks team, for example,
take full responsibility of getting the site ready
for the timber frame company, who will project manage that stage
and basically get us to a watertight shell.
How much did you pay for this land, then, this beautiful acre?
135.
Sorry? 135. 135,000? Are you sure?
We did our research. Yeah, we did our research.
And the farmer who owned it helped us out, obviously,
by giving us a good deal.
Even so, how much are you going to spend on the house itself,
building it? 700. That's all in, is it?
All in. And that includes a contingency, as well.
That's everything, then? 700, tops?
Plus 135,000 for the land, that's 835 grand.
Where does all that come from?
So, most of the build cost will come from a mortgage.
So the mortgage is 660,000.
At current rates, that's a phenomenal amount of money.
Because, well, I mean, standard bank rates might be say 4.5 at the moment
but for self-build, I imagine it's quite a bit more? Yes.
How much are they charging you? So, close to 7% now.
Jeez. It's around £3,000 a month.
OK. So, you really, really do want to finish quickly.
Absolutely. Because you could save yourself a stack load of cash
by finishing early,
terminating that self-build mortgage early
and then presumably converting to a standard rate. Correct. Yeah.
And how long is that going to take, then?
From start to end of the build? Yeah. We're hoping 18 months.
18 months. So, 40,000 in interest across the project.
18 month project. If it goes over, you'll be really cursing, won't you?
You don't want it to go over. No, we don't want it to go over.
You don't want it to cost more, you don't want it to run over.
Ideally not, no.
It all sounds so straightforward, doesn't it?
Well, all this is incredibly well organised.
Now, I can't keep pace with Giuliano and Zara's organisation,
the number of ventures and businesses
and plans that they all have, and quite clearly,
they are so well organised, they work so hard,
that they've been able to create clear boundaries
around all of their projects to contain them.
The thing is, though,
is that building does not respect boundaries.
The process of putting a house up is...
..it's traditional, its fraught, its highly complex,
it's always specific to a site.
It's full of problems.
And, as a result,
it respects no man or woman's boundaries.
It fills your life with chaos and worry.
And that's what's going to happen here.
It is mere hours before the first problem rears its head.
Thanks to a row of conifers on site,
building control have stipulated that
the nearby foundations be dug down two metres,
far deeper than anticipated.
How many more cubic metres of concrete
are you going to have to then buy, do you reckon?
Probably looking at a good ten cube, possibility more.
So, your client's paying? More than likely, yeah.
I love the idea of the fixed price contract,
for a fixed price specification.
But when specification changes, well, then...
It needs to change the price, yeah. Yeah.
The groundworks were supposed to cost 30 grand. But not any more.
It's a fair bit more concrete,
maybe close to £4,000 of extra concrete.
Unfortunately, it's just one of those costs
that we've had to swallow.
It's never fun just pouring more unnecessary money into the ground.
Just three days later,
the deeper concrete strip foundations,
all 160 metres of them, are poured,
a job so epic it ends up going on late into the evening,
while Giuliano's living in this tiny studio flat near the site,
somehow holding down a full-time tech job
as well as project managing.
100 miles away in Northamptonshire,
Zara's getting used
to generating her social media content
from Giuliano's mum and dad's...
Long wearing... Baaagh! Dammit!
..in the house where he grew up.
The one I'm using is a moisturiser and primer in one,
so this is amazing.
A great pro tip is to let your concealer set
for about two minutes,
if you have time.
And I edit it later.
But why can't she do this influencing in Lincolnshire?
With my job, I have a lot of products,
and I would take up
the whole, entire place if I brought everything with me.
If I were to bring this all to Lincolnshire,
I think Giuliano might have a heart attack.
She'll be back in Lincolnshire at weekends,
and living separately is
a sacrifice Zara's determined will be short-lived.
The moment that we can solidly live in there,
I absolutely do not care if I have to sleep on the floor.
Personally, I'm hoping October, I'll be able to move in.
Hold on, that's only six months away.
Then again, this project's going gangbusters.
Just weeks in,
the block and beam floor is being installed,
and the timber frame is arriving in ten days' time.
I'm trying to bring a bit of efficiency,
as much as I can, into construction,
to streamline the process, as best as I can.
And that includes doing anything Giuliano can on site,
before and after the working day, to keep things moving.
When I'm arranging these bricks for the bricklayers,
the face-side is up,
that way they're not having to faff around,
half a second saved, and make their lives ten times easier.
But a few days later, a problem surfaces.
The foundations are supposed to be complete,
but a vital job's been left undone -
the perimeter levelling of the foundations in blockwork
around the whole building.
The groundworkers' team said it's not in their responsibility
and they're not bricklayers, so they wouldn't do it.
The brickies on site have said that groundworks teams would do it.
That's not going to solve the problem, though, is it?
And that's something that Zara and I are both learning about
as we...as we go through this process.
That fraught complexity
and insipient chaos I warned of is beginning to set in.
This project needs the guiding hand of experience.
Ahh!
In Lincolnshire, Giuliano and Zara have found an unlikely ally
to help them fit the concrete blocks around
the perimeter of their foundations.
It's dried up beautiful, hasn't it?
Jim, the son of the farmer who sold them the land,
just so happens to be an experienced builder.
All right, I'll get a mix on, then.
I'm looking at you like a proud brother.
That's what I'm looking at.
You're the brother I never had, Jim. Yeah.
Oh, no, wait. I do have a brother.
Don't tell him I said that. Yeah!
Jim's help is costing £3,000 that wasn't in the budget,
but without his experience, this project may well have run adrift.
Jim provides the trusted ear and the technical expertise.
When Jim says something,
I can bet my bottom dollar that it's true. Isn't that right, Jim?
Yeah. Yeah, it is.
170 miles from Reading, they're already making new friends.
As to what's propelled them to move here now,
while still relatively young,
it transpires there's a powerful, personal motivator.
Most people think about self-build
as a project they might do one day. But most people don't do it.
My mum, um, very out of the blue, um, died,
just from a brain haemorrhage from nowhere.
Yeah. It was just a massive shock.
Um, and I don't know if that's really sunken fully in yet... Yeah.
..and I don't know if it ever will.
When she passed, she hadn't even retired.
It's events like that that, that happen in your life that...
That's just when you kind of like think to yourself, you just,
you just have to grab life.
It's just like anything can happen tomorrow.
That's an inspiring ethos which helps explain why, just six weeks in
and 40 grand spent on foundations and scaffolding,
their 160 grand timber frame turns up from Hull,
almost a third of the entire budget now gone.
Now we actually start seeing what is essentially
the beginnings of the house. And within 20 days,
Turner Timber should be able to get us to watertight stage.
Showing 90.
Only it's not long before the frame installation manager,
Matt, spots another potential hiccup in the height of the foundations.
A little bit off?
It does get a little bit worse as you go around
checking it... Does it? ..to be honest, yeah.
You'd like to think if it was a main contractor,
then levels and things like that would have been checked.
If somebody's doing it for the first time,
you don't really know what to look out for and not, do you?
It's not an ideal situation,
but the discrepancy is within tolerance.
The access track onto site isn't level, either,
so manoeuvring materials around is tricky.
And there's a 55 tonne crane arriving tomorrow.
It's really soft. It's obviously, we've had bad weather
and so as we've been running the telehandler today,
you can see it's just causing ruts in the site,
and when we bring a crane in,
it's a hell of a lot heavier than a telehandler.
Jim, of course, is on hand to save the day.
Driving lesson, then, go on. All right, then.
And give Giuliano a crash course in driving a three tonne roller,
renting it's added a further £200 to the budget.
Push it forward to go forward. Yeah.
Pull it back to go back. Yeah.
This button on here's to vibrate,
and you want it vibrating.
That on, yeah. Yeah. And it'll start going again.
It wants to be absolutely flat-out
because it'll compact it better. OK. Yeah.
Er, little bit nervous but...
Just do this bit, if you feel more comfortable, for a start, while...
Yeah. Where you are. OK.
That's it.
He'll be all right. He'll be spot-on.
He's a fast learner, isn't he?
Well, he's got to be.
Giuliano's schedule doesn't allow for on the job training.
Yet, come the afternoon, there's some good news,
a solution to the not entirely level foundations.
Now we've laid our sole plate down,
this point here is 5mm higher than the rest of the slab,
so rather than packing the rest of the sole plate up to that level,
we're going to just reduce that bit.
So we're going to run a planer over it
to bring a little bit of the sole plate down,
to then bring everything back to a level.
Come day two, with the help of the crane...
I'll bring it in on angle, see how we get on.
..and that freshly compacted ground,
the timber structure rockets up in no time,
176 timber panels in all,
as well as a series of chunky steel beams that facilitate
the home's open-plan layout.
It's a bit awkward, isn't it?
Yeah. That, I'm short by 5mm.
Yeah, that's nice.
But this is the easy bit.
Yeah, go for that, Len.
When you remember that this big timber-frame structure has
to end up like something like
this vast, industrial, brick malthouse near Birmingham,
an endangered historic building,
that dates from the 1870s.
Its telltale details include buttressing brick piers
to strengthen the walls
and to support the load of the grain on the upper floors,
and also small windows -
light wasn't needed for the barley to germinate.
But, of course, the most striking quality,
the hardest to emulate with new brickwork,
is its time-worn character, its age.
Remarkable, isn't it, how we connect to decay?
The idea that as buildings slowly rot away,
that there is a kind of natural, a sort of patination,
a kind of creation of interest in the surface texture.
No wonder, then, that we decide we want to live in houses
that look older than they are.
That we want to buy distressed
and patinated furniture to create
a false sense of history in our lives,
to connect us to place and to time.
That we even decide
to buy clothes which come pre-distressed!
Maybe Giuliano and Zara will find a way to distress bricks to give them
a similar patina of age.
Well, they already have.
This facility in Shropshire is distressing their bricks right now.
Shall we have a look? Yeah, yeah, have a look.
First, new bricks are sprayed
with either a light or dark pigment.
Ooh, look at that. There's a slight sooting.
Yes, make it very subtle... Yeah.
..and replicate the way
a brick would naturally weather over perhaps 100 years. Yeah.
That's the idea.
Next, a key ingredient is added,
to suggest the bricks have been reclaimed from an old wall.
What he's now doing is he's dabbing the bricks by hand
with a yellow sand and white cement mix.
This is... Reproduces the effect of mortar.
This is... I mean, this is what
he's applying, is mortar onto the back of the brick, yeah? Correct.
Finally, they're put in an enormous tumbling machine
to rough up their edges.
It's great.
They look like they've come out of an old building.
An epic 25,000 tumbled bricks are needed
to clad Giuliano and Zara's timber frame...
..a job Giuliano's tasked to the brothers Nathan and Ash,
who he, naturally, discovered on social media.
Good to meet you. And you.
I think it looks bigger than it is because it's wide,
but it's quite thin, right?
Yeah. Yeah, it's a good size. Yeah. A good size.
There's 52 pallets.
Nice.
That's because I said, "What does 25,000 bricks look like?"
And they said, "52 pallets."
And I was like, "OK." Yeah.
So then, hopefully, we get good weather
for the entire run of bricks. Well, they say it's...
No, don't anything, Ash.
Jinx it. Yeah. Yeah. Ready to go. Yeah.
Nathan and Ash reckon
the gargantuan task will take eight weeks.
All slightly different sizes. All over the shop.
Yeah. Each one.
Look at that. That's quite extreme.
Giuliano will happily have that side in as a face.
This one? Yeah.
Bloody Nora! He says, the rougher, the better, he says.
That one right above his front door.
Go on! Just to annoy him!
Whether this ends up looking authentic or a bit of a muddle
is not on Giuliano and Zara's radar
because they're too busy carrying ten grands' worth
of roof slates up ladders in a backpacks,
nine at a time -
as documented on social media, of course.
So, the purpose of doing this...?
We were told by the timber frame manufacturer,
before the brick work gets too high,
you need to have the roof on,
or at least the weight... Weight. ..on the roof,
so that it compresses the kit down.
Yeah.
We had the option of telling the brickies,
OK, pull back away for two weeks
and come back when the roof's done.
Or... Or alternatively...
You do it. Yes.
Wow, you've effectively mimicked
the full effect of the finished roof there. Exactly. Exactly.
In truth,
I'm starting to admire these two influencers.
They know how to really graft, and their labours,
motivated as they are by such a desire to be living here in October,
are propelling this project forwards.
Heroically, Nathan and Ash complete
their vast brickwork job in the anticipated eight weeks.
And the first roofing slates are laid,
bang-on schedule.
And, come August,
contractors arrive to install £80,000 worth of glass.
Goodness me, I might have to have to eat humble pie!
This project is flying!
Such a big piece of single glass.
Always a bit nerve-racking watching.
The largest pane for the first-floor landing
weighs threequarters of a tonne.
And I thought doing eye-liner was stressful.
Gosh! This is much more of a steady hand.
If, touch wood anything happens,
it's a major delay,
so I think there's just so much running on this moment.
Just come in with the main beam, Gary.
You can slew left a bit if you like, Gary.
Whoa! That's Gary's left. Oh. Sorry.
Gary?
Gary!
Gary, pull us straight back into the frame.
Whoa. That'll do fine. That's it.
Wow!
Look at that! That is awesome!
That is a window and a half! Wow!
But, there is a frustrating snag.
The window fitters couldn't install the roof lights
as the panels supplied didn't fit.
Right now, we can't do anything in the living room
because that's not properly watertight
when we get heavy rain. Yeah.
It's not properly watertight
to start doing plaster boarding.
So, it's pushed us back, which is a tad annoying.
It's going to take time to make new panels,
and that has put paid to them moving in in October.
Ouch!
In Lincolnshire, autumn's approaching by the time
the right size windows are fitted,
allowing for full steam ahead with the interior fit out.
Plastering walls,
screeding floors,
and whatever jobs Giuliano and Zara can turn their hands to.
We're trying to be as invested in the process as much as we can.
Every hour that we spend on site means that we're one step closer
to being moved in.
And there's a new urgency
to getting moved in as soon as possible.
I've learned to have to live in chaos for a little while.
It's all hands to the pumps.
Zara's even moved into the tiny studio
with Giuliano near the site,
something she hadn't originally anticipated.
I don't think I realised how long these things take.
When we first started,
obviously, things went up quite quick,
and now it's sort of everything's a little slower
because they're more intricate details.
The desperation to get in is...is...is prominent.
Which makes it all the more surreal to see
an entirely new structure being built, in the garden.
It's took us four days so far.
It's very rare we install pergolas as big as it is.
Right. They're getting heavier!
The scale of it, it's very large.
Not what we're used to.
The pergola's costing £20,000.
Yeah, that's really cool.
Ohh! Oh, my word! What is that?
That... Surely that's not meant to be here, is it?
That's huge!
It's like they're constructing not so much a garden
but a garden centre!
It begs the question, "Why?"
Hello! He shouted down the mile-long pergola.
It's got an amazing acoustic.
So I knew you were going to build a pergola, right,
but I didn't know it was going to be quite as, um...impressive.
I've seen structures like this in car parks and large hotels,
you know, where they have
kind of, like, 50 chairs laid out for breakfast.
What's the plan here?
You're not going to be doing that?
No, we're not.
We're just going to have decking down,
all the way through.
Hopefully, a hot tub at the end...
Hopefully, yeah. ..if we can afford it.
Yes, so the idea of the pergola is to really create
a permanent feature that ties the house to the landscape
because otherwise it will just be a garden.
What's wrong with a garden?
Ordinarily, people finish their houses,
and then they think about the landscaping
and turn their attentions outside.
We had to do the pergola first, actually,
so that we could get the measurements for the Corten.
So, the Corten steel... Mm. Rusty metal... Yes.
..is going on the front of the building and on the back.
On both portals, is that right?
Yeah, so the Corten will go on both portals,
and then also on the inside of the hallway and the landing as well.
So, it will run through?
Run through to create that visual illusion that
the Corten portal is punched through.
Yeah. Nice.
Yet having drawn down a scary £580,000 of their mortgage,
they're having to work as hard as they've ever worked
to finance this project.
I will be very glad to not live out of a suitcase.
I've been doing that for a very, very long time now.
So I have a pretty heavy week this week
because I'm travelling all over the UK.
Drive safe. Thanks.
Love you. Bye. Love you, too.
Doing this, the travelling back and forth,
it's definitely hard, I think.
Er, it takes a toll physically because I'm driving so much
and away so much,
and I absolutely, like, I love my job
but I think now, having the build on top of it,
and then the business on top of it, it's a lot of pressure.
As Zara heads to a make-up gig in Greenwich...
..back in Lincolnshire, Giuliano's also on an important mission,
to visit the local farmer, Steve.
Morning. Steve, how we doing?
Well, thanks.
These two have developed an unlikely friendship
over the last few months.
Zara baked some cookies. Ooooh! Perfect!
How's Zara? Yeah, she's all right.
She had a bit of an early start this morning.
Oh, did she? Where's she gone?
She's gone to London, but she had to wake up at two.
Ooh!
I wondered if you'd time, whilst you're here,
just to have a look at the emails or the Wi-Fi, if that's OK?
Yeah, absolutely.
Steve lends Giuliano the odd telehandler or digger on site
and, in exchange, tech wizard Giuliano helps out
with Steve's IT problems.
Sometimes he'll say, "Oh, I haven't got any emails
"in the past four days or something."
It's been quite handy having Giuliano on the doorstep.
Nice to see a bit of youth and vitality entering area, I think.
You know, they're modest and understated,
and I think they're a welcome addition to the community, I think.
Come November, some of the interior finishes begin...
It's so nice.
..starting with a refined, micro-concrete floor.
Only it transpires this is the second attempt at the floor.
So, their whole kitchen-diner and the entrance hall,
that was all done to top coat.
We came in the next morning and, yeah, Giuliano wasn't 100% happy.
It's taken longer.
I'm over by a week, maybe two.
But I'm glad we got there eventually.
Another major tweak is afoot, at this late stage, in the garage.
So... Oh, you can get a good car in here.
A wide car. Or two tiny ones. What's the plan?
No cars. No cars. No cars?
It's not to get a car in here any more.
This is going to be our home gym.
We can't put the dumbbells in the living room, though, can we?
Yeah, like hundreds and thousands of other people in this country,
you're putting the gym in the garage?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
But one element that won't change is
the rusty Corten steel portal frame,
a slice of where fashion meets architecture.
Once the Corten's on, it's just going to really pull it together.
I'm so excited!
But money is so tight and the Corten so expensive,
up to 50 grand to supply and fit,
Giuliano and Zara have decided to take a big gamble
on measuring and fitting it themselves.
We wouldn't have ideally liked to do the measurements ourselves
because there's always a risk, when you do measurements yourself,
of them not fitting correctly.
102.4.
This bit here?
No. No. This bit?
Yeah, that rounded bit. OK.
But the Corten company that we're working with,
we asked how much a site measure would be,
and they said, "Oh, that will be thousands and thousands."
Yeah, I'm not paying thousands and thousands of pounds
for a site measurement.
No, I think it's up.
Check the drawing. Yep.
Look, we've measured it as accurately as we can.
We've done our best. We'll just see.
The Corten is being fabricated at this workshop in Bedfordshire
for £15,000.
We've got a 4-kilowatt fibre laser
which will cut up to one inch thick mild steel
within a 0.1mm tolerance.
The risk of taking those aspects on yourself,
and not relying on someone else
and paying for someone else to do it, is if something goes wrong.
It could end up costing you some more money at the end of it.
It's a lot of metal.
I think it's in the region of
four or five tonnes in total, or something, of metal.
It's quite a job to install it,
so I admire them both fantastically for doing it.
It's not like wood.
You can't just shave a little bit off.
So, fingers crossed, it'll all go to plan.
Four weeks later...
..installation has begun.
Sort of.
Our measurements perhaps could have been a bit more...more accurate.
Could this be a challenge too far, even for dependable Jim?
Say the brick work's out 3mm,
the timber frame's out 3mm the other way.
Combined, it's 6mm.
So all of a sudden, you've got a 6mm gap.
It doesn't fit.
It doesn't fit? Ohhh...
Why is it not going in?
None of us have done anything like this before.
Oh, bugger!
I'm not going to lie, it is tricky.
Yeah, but that looks rough, like,
that does. Rough. Properly rough.
Has all this been a brilliant strategy,
or a false economy jeopardising the appearance of the entire house?
Only time and the rusting of the steel will tell.
We're not going to get it any better than that. No.
Giuliano and Zara took a step into the unknown
when they upped sticks from
the comfortable Home Counties
to the Lincolnshire Wolds,
and set about building a new home
16 months ago.
I'm very much looking forward
to seeing this project finished, you know?
I mean, partly because of the building.
It's such an unusual shape,
long and thin, on the footprint of that old malthouse.
And that's going to set up all kinds of unusual,
I don't know, engagement through the building
with the landscape behind it.
I want it to be theatrical.
I want it to be not just the usual,
modest Lincolnshire house
on a long road.
I want it to have presence.
To be fair to Giuliano and Zara,
they did say it would take 18 months,
and I'm here two months early.
So, is it even finished?
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
Nice.
Of course it is!
So sharp!
It puts on quite a show.
Well, it's all beautifully done, and very tightly finished.
And that long shape of the malthouse on this footprint,
that's really good.
There are the brick piers
and the small windows piercing it rhythmically.
And in the middle of it is this great piece of theatre.
This steel box.
Very, very well done.
But it's thrust right through the middle of all this softness.
It's quite an aggressive, energetic statement that.
Make of it what you will.
Ah! Hello.
Hello, both of you. How are you, Zara? OK. Good. Good to see you.
You're looking really well. Thank you so much. The pair of you.
And you, Giuliano, how are you? Yeah, good, Kevin.
How long you been living here?
Since May? Yeah, we moved in in May. Yeah.
Over two months ago, yeah? Yeah.
It's great. The whole building is so crisp.
And I was unsure about the bricks, but in a way,
they've been upstaged by the Corten.
Yeah! So they're quit, you know, they're quite subtle.
Yeah. Yeah, they are.
They're pushed back.
How tough has it been?
Ohhh! It's been tough.
Tough, yeah.
We've spent so much time and effort getting involved
in every stage of the process.
There's...there's a handmade feel to it.
Very handmade feel.
We like to say, "Come and have a look, but don't look too close."
Can we see inside? Absolutely. Yeah, come on in.
Thank you.
Nice, well-proportioned, small front door!
So solid, though. Because it's steel, like the Corten.
Oh, blimey! And that just carries on
all the way through.
Oh, that's brilliant.
It's really strong.
That's quite something.
And the ceiling here is running
to join with the pergola,
which is the most fantastically majestic exercise in perspective.
And it's ready and waiting for the aircraft to land.
Yes! It is!
What's that? Oh, my word!
It's a living chandelier.
Yeah. I really wanted to bring the feel of Singapore
because there's an amazing place there called Gardens by the Bay
and that just reminds me of it.
Oh! What a lovely thing! To bring that here!
This almost civic-scale entrance hall...
Oh, yeah.
..leads directly to the restaurant-sized kitchen-diner.
It's very strong!
Nice big spaces. Mm-hm.
I could never bring myself to paint a ceiling that colour.
I paint all my ceilings white. You know, how dull!
But this is amazing!
The table's fabulous.
It's like... It's just a big slice through a tree.
Yeah. That is exactly what it is.
Where's it from? Vietnam.
We work with a company who salvage trees
that have been left to rot... Mm-hm.
..so it's quite a sustainable way of making something quite beautiful
from something that would have been lost.
The table was very important
because my mum always talked about having a round table.
When you're on a circle you speak to everyone,
everybody's involved in the conversation.
It's a good thing.
And you've got a really interesting heritage
between the two of you. Yeah. Haven't you?
And it's kind of... It's inter-continental.
It is. Yes.
It's a bit of everything really, isn't it, almost? South American.
And then we're from Asia,
half Asian, and then we're half Indian/Kenyan.
All of the spaces are quite open to allow family
to connect with one another,
and that's such an important thing in both of our cultures.
Yeah. So having family to stay... Exactly.
..is important here. Absolutely.
So, kitchen other there.
Have you designed it for the food business?
We have.
And when you run a food business, you have to have all of those things
to make sure that, you know, you're separating everything.
And what's that beam? Surely that's not a piece of wood?
No, it's a false oak beam which has been sculpted and made on site.
In what? Just in plaster.
It's hugely persuasive. Yeah.
I mean the colouring is brilliant, and also the detailing.
It's naughty, really. I mean,
it's straight out of Pinewood Studios 1956 that.
Yeah! Amazing!
To the other side of the hall sits
the impossibly high sitting room,
open right up to the building's ridge.
Wow! Lovely room.
Lovely view of the pond.
And then you get this extra layer
above there through that glazing.
You've got this...all this contact with the sky.
The space comes into its own.
And everything that's on there is all my mum's.
And that's her? Yeah, that's my mum.
Yeah, yeah, lovely.
What a lovely thing!
Also down here are a bathroom,
utility room and that all-important
former garage gym.
While upstairs, the usually more humdrum spaces...
Oh, wow!
..are here, anything but.
It's quite hard to describe this experience, isn't it?
Yeah.
It's like you're outside.
These must be some of
the largest sheets of glass you can get.
They are commercial scale units.
Yeah. It works brilliantly.
And it's all the more strongly framed by the steel.
Oh, and then this.
Yes, there's yet more drama,
thanks to the suspended walkway above the sitting room.
What I love about this is the fact
that the hallway is set off the wall. Mm-hm.
It's a flying bridge.
So, there's this sort of element of suspense.
I mean literally!
Yeah, drama in that.
Of course, Giuliano and Zara's bedroom is up here, too.
Arguably, what is most important is
Zara's permanent make-up studio next door.
So, north-facing window?
North-facing.
North-facing creates a steady light,
a natural light all through the day.
Is that a tripod? That is a small tripod.
Yeah, my tripod. Before, when I was filming,
I would have to do essentially a balancing act.
I'd have to pile up books. Yeah.
And now filming is just easy.
One of my most favourite views, and you'll laugh,
is looking down this extremely long corridor,
because it's an extremely long building,
at a toilet pan!
The internal doors haven't arrived yet.
Maybe they shouldn't.
Also on the far side of the walkway,
is Giuliano's office,
and two guest, or future family, bedrooms
which, to some extent, explains the staggering size of this place.
It's a miracle that they built it in under 18 months.
But they did have the help of countless others, too,
especially Jim.
When they met you, things fell into place.
It's surprising how things happen, yeah.
Somebody to hold his hand through the process, guide it, build it.
I distinctly remember a Sunday evening,
and the poor lad was nearly in tears.
And then, from then, yeah, here we are.
This is it.
To be fair, we've worked well as a team.
Like, he got stuck in, credit where credit's due.
And the Corten,
me and Giuliano tackled that. We did that.
I have to say I've been looking for
the faults in the Corten and I can't find them.
Please look harder, Kevin!
Are they there?
Yeah. If you can't find fault, I'm happy!
No, it's worked well, it has. It's worked well. Yeah.
Constructing any building, especially one on this scale,
comes at a cost, and not just financial.
It's probably been the toughest thing that I've done
and we've done. Mm.
Yeah, I think I probable went into construction -
maybe with a bit of delusion, I don't know -
thinking that...
..each stage of the project would align nicely.
But that certainly wasn't the case.
But it really does suck up every single moment
of free time that you have.
We've had to give up every single weekend...
..for the past 14 months.
Zara, for example,
I have no idea how she functions on three hours of sleep.
I don't know how many couples could do this.
Tell me about money.
You wanted to be in for 700,000.
623.
No, no, no.
That's... You've come in under?
Yeah.
How?
Our hand's been forced by the state of the economy
and interest rates,
and it basically doubled in interest. Yeah.
We started to get to thinking,
"OK, can we even afford the monthly payments?"
And so we made the decision to... Yeah. ..not take down
the last stage of the mortgage,
and try and finish it as much as we could on our own.
I've always been told, nothing is given,
you have to earn it.
And so... Yeah. ..we've had to
sacrifice big time for this. We have.
Um, tell me, your mum, what would she think of it?
Oh, my gosh!
My mum, I think she'd...
She'd just love it so much.
I think she'd be extremely proud.
It's come in ahead of programme,
and it's come in under budget.
Credit where credit is due. Very, very well done!
Giuliano and Zara's tenacity,
resilience and sacrifice have more than left a mark on this home.
There's a commonly held belief
that if you want to self-build you've got to be of mature years,
have wisdom and experience,
be in your 40s, or even your 60s.
I don't think that's the case at all.
I think you need to be in your 30s, or even your '20s.
Because, yes, it does help if you've got project management experience.
Giuliano does.
It does help if you've got a bit of a pioneering spirit.
Well, both Zara and he have that.
But what's really needed,
is energy, and vast amounts of it.
And fitness and stamina.
And, goodness me,
have these two demonstrated
all of those qualities in droves.
They've brought such resource to this project!
And not only that,
in collaborating so tightly,
in sharing all the physical jobs, like lifting slates onto the roof
and blocks into the ground,
they've...they've actually multiplied the energy,
as it were, of the project.
They've actually shared that spirit
with the local community here,
brought people along with them to help them out.
So it's paid dividends, in the end.
And it's also, it's reshaped my view of millennials.
I mean, goodness me,
I'm not sure if I could do what they've done here.
Could you?
No, I take my hard hat off to them.
This is had to happen because of my disability.
I just don't want to get it wrong.
I don't want it to look, it's made for a wheelchair.
At the minute, it does feel a bit never ending.
The fibreglass isn't completely dry,
if there's any water on there, the resin will not cure.
Everything is very wet.
You've suffered a baptism of fibreglass.
That's going to take a lot more work and money.
We're going to be skint.
It's just a bit difficult sometimes.
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