Grand Designs
The quirky charm of a British homebuilding show.
It seems to happen every time. The affable Kevin McCloud, host of British television’s Grand Designs, describes the house project he will cover in the upcoming episode, and fairly predictably I find myself thinking:
They have got to be out of their minds.
Whether it’s the extreme locale the owners have chosen, the seeming folly of restoring and subsequently inhabiting a derelict theatre, for example, or the absurd expectations of time, budget or a combination thereof, the viewer is always left with a sense that — this time — it’s all going to hell. The project will end up on the rubbish tip with the owners battered and broken by the experience. While some have come close, it has not yet happened on the numerous episodes I have watched so far. Surprisingly, that has not diminished its appeal one bit. It’s the same reason we watch car racing or downhill skiing — the vicarious thrill of what might happen.
Yet like the Saturday matinee serials of old, the art in Grand Designs is to set up the peril in a credible way so that you can suspend your disbelief temporarily and really engage in the outcome of the story. It does this without the contrived deadlines of the renovate-and-flip shows so common on TV here in North America. In the latter case the deadline seems to be for no better reason than a quick sale equals quick profit. In Grand Designs, however, it’s often a sense that if the house doesn’t get built, the charming couple and their sweet kids are going to wind up living on the street with a huge mortgage on a hole in the ground filled with rusting rebar.
It’s an illusion. Like any television show, the story that gets told is not necessarily the one that actually occurred, but rather the one the editor wants you to see. But it is done in such a skillful way with Grand Designs that you don’t get the overwhelming sense that critical details have been omitted to make the story hold water, to artificially add tension or to get to a conclusion within the allocated timeframe. I find myself waiting for the final reveal genuinely anxious to see how the finished product turned out if, in fact, it turned out at all.
Normally, shows dumped in the middle of a weekday afternoon schedule on broadcast television are, literally, not worth even a small fraction of the time spent watching them. But when Grand Designs mysteriously appeared on Canadian TV in this slot a while back, the premise of the show sounded intriguing enough to warrant time-slipping it into prime evening viewing hours. I watched one show, and I was hooked.
It’s a simple concept: each episode focuses on a single house that the owners describe in concept at the beginning, typically, with the aid of some pretty whizzy architectural graphics. The project is subsequently chronicled with McCloud visiting a number of times over the course of the build. Each episode wraps up with a walk through of the finished, or in some cases nearly finished, product. More often than not the results are, in a word, stunning.
As the seasons roll by the projects undertaken have become steadily more Grand. Some are ambitious renovations of existing structures while others are brand new houses typically of ultramodern design. The projects are located in the United Kingdom, for the most part, with the occasional departure to France or Spain. Shows of current vintage almost always feature green construction techniques and materials which must only be available in Europe. I only wish we had access to the same neat stuff here that they have on the show.
In the Grand Designs Revisited variant, McCloud returns a number of years later to projects from previous seasons. While being a clever way of repurposing existing material, there’s no law that says you can’t fast forward to the last 10 minutes and see how the dream has endured through the years. Even taking into account the power of editing to sculpt the outcome, it is surprising to see the number of projects that have truly stood the test of time and in some cases evolved to meet the emergent needs of the owners. I suppose a few of the subject houses have fallen down, but they don’t seem to make it to air, and it might even seem ghoulish if they did. It just doesn’t seem to be the point.
The host for its entire 17 year run (to date), Kevin McCloud has a dry, British sense of humor coupled with formidable subject matter expertise. It makes him virtually perfect for the role. Assuming he has final say as to which projects get to air and which get passed over, he obviously has a keen sense of his audience and their tastes even as they have evolved over the years. He also challenges the project owners in each episode without badgering, insulting or offending them even when its clear that they have their hands firmly on the wheel of a car going straight off a cliff. McCloud is the only presenter I have seen that can describe a project, mid-show, as looking like a “shit heap” and have all parties be happy about it.
Barbara Woodhouse, who became a sensation in the 1980s with her various dog training shows and books, made it clear that getting your dog to do what you want is rarely a matter of training the dog. Rather, it’s about training you, the dog’s owner. I remember thinking that while the dogs were often nonplussed by the never-ending, shrill “walkies!” the owners looked mildly terrified by Ms. Woodhouse’s methods. When you watched Woodhouse, you were really watching a show about human nature, with the dogs thrown in for comic relief. That was the appeal of the show. That and the host of unique characters — both two- and four-legged — they managed to offer up week in, week out.
Grand Designs borrows from this. The homeowners featured in each episode are unvarnished, ordinary human beings who, like many of us, often have dreams that exceed their grasp and no where near the money to pay for them. But they are driven by a personal, burning desire as important for them as anything else in their lives. It’s surprising to me that when their budget nearly always goes over what was planned they rarely back off, often taking on a mortgage that they hoped to avoid or spending money they had hoped to save. Some are seemingly driven to near financial ruin. But onwards they go. This is at the core of the show. It’s about building houses, of course, but the real appeal is the people and their unadulterated pursuit of their life’s dream. That’s the part that seems very real.
Then there are the houses themselves. They range from the minute to the palatial set in landscapes from remote, arrestingly beautiful Scottish coastal islands through to postage stamp-sized lots in the heart of metropolitan London. Almost without exception the finished product is dramatic and rarely one that was easily visualized at the outset. These projects require real vision. This is the other critical role that McCloud plays, walking us through the architecture and explaining it without insulting our intelligence. When some new, spectacular home is described or revealed and we say “wow!” but don’t really know why, Kevin helps us with that. He is doing every landscape we touch a favor by gently providing an education in architecture and design for us. It’s never preaching, didactic or patronizing. Rather, it’s one of “I think this house is beautiful and here’s why I think that.” He clearly doesn’t love every house featured in the show. But he does appreciate every house and does not judge them on the viewers’ behalf.
Which makes me think that we have a ways to go in this part of the world when it comes to where and how we live. Potemkin-esque subdivisions get slapped up and then snapped up by buyers eager for square footage, stainless steel appliances and granite countertops. We only have ourselves to blame when they begin to look dowdy and rundown just a decade or two later. But that’s OK, because by that time, there is yet another subdivision, just a little bit further out, that will have even more square feet and even more stainless steel and granite. We can then simply throw the old house away and start with a new one.
Perhaps it’s the fact that Grand Designs is set in the UK. When you cram that many people into such a small area — without losing the spectacularly beautiful greenspaces often featured — you have to make the best of limited resources of every type. They have to re-use wisely and build to last. Their approach is so different from our own, and one we could do well to learn more about as we think about the grand design for our own lives.
©2016 Terence C. Gannon
Thank you for reading. This essay is also available an episode of the Not There Yet podcast, available on all of your favourite podcast platforms. If you enjoyed this, please leave a clap or two below, they really help. Your comments are welcome also welcome.
