The worst episodes of Grand Designs
Ranked by viewer rating, lows first. Vote on a placement to back it or contest it.
- 01
Kevin McCloud meets entrepreneur Paul Wilkinson and his wife Amy, who are building a giant new home on a 16-acre plot in Lincolnshire. The superstructure will be comprised of five circular buildings made up of interlocking timber cylinders, linked by raised wooden walkways that hang over a fishing lake. The complicated build proves difficult for Paul's local team, and their ambitious schedule of completing the project in a year soon looks out of reach.
- 02
Architect Henning Stummel and his partner Alice Dawson plan to convert a dilapidated joinery workshop in north London into a contemporary family home and office. They want to preserve the building's original steel frame, but to restore it they will have to take it down, which means carefully extracting it from the neighbours' walls without causing damage to their property - and that's just the start of the couple's problems. Kevin McCloud follows their progress.
- 03
Why are our homes so often designed to be so serious and purely practical? Surely there's space for a bit more fun? That's what Matt and Sophie White from Sussex believe. They want to build a giant family house of fun for themselves and their children. It will be a mysterious black home kitted out with a revolving bookcase door, secret dens, hiding places behind one-way mirrors and a fireman's pole. Matt wants the house to evolve, so he uses a steel frame system which means they can change the layout whenever they want. There are other changes too - like amending the window shapes and sizes and adding a new half floor to create a James Bond room. Just what will this house look like in the end?
- 04
Richmond: Hypoallergenic House
In the first 'healthy' home project ever seen on Grand Designs, gallery owner Elinor and fitness entrepreneur Born set themselves the near impossible task of creating Britain's first hypoallergenic house in a leafy back garden plot in south west London. Driven by the need to alleviate their two young sons' life-threatening allergies, their new part-submerged, shed-inspired home, will be constructed using low toxin materials and deploy cutting-edge filtration systems to clean the air they breathe. Right from the start, Born and Elinor are up against it, with access issues to their plot and the need to be super strict concerning suitable materials. It's an immense burden and with the children still suffering weekly allergy attacks, a race against time to get moved in. But will their innovative new house deliver the benefits Elinor and Born are hoping for?
- 05
Hull: Underground Family House
Richard and Felicia almost single-handedly turn an underground water reservoir in the Humber Estuary into a family home. It's an epic task. And then a life threatening illness strikes.
- 06
Kevin McCloud meets master carpenter Olaf, who is facing the biggest challenge of his career - creating an oasis for himself and partner Fritha on a small slice of land in West Sussex, which happens to be surrounded by a mainline railway and a busy A-road. Not only that, but half of the plot can't even be built on due an underground mains sewer. All they're left with is a very small triangle on which to build their future life together. With £190,000 in the bank, Olaf and Fritha must use all the ingenuity they can muster to make their triangular three-bedroom house come to life.
- 07
Kinross, Scotland: Black Minimalist House
Kevin McCloud meets architect Iain and his wife Jenny, who intend to build an enormous black minimalist house right in the middle of a 19th-century Scottish country estate. Their grand vision also involves connecting the new rectangular block to a dilapidated gardener's bothy - and the neighbours are watching.
- 08
Kevin McCloud follows more of Britain's most ambitious self-building projects, as intrepid individuals attempt to design and construct the home of their dreams. After 40 years living largely in the southeast of England, artist Sarah is returning to her roots in the northeast with towering ambitions for an exposed, three-acre plot that she's bought at auction in the Durham Dales. She wants to create a radical home and creative hub combined, including a studio and gallery for displaying and selling art. With her budget of £330,000, Sarah hopes to build with a super-sustainable yet still relatively unknown and hard-to-predict material - hempcrete. Left exposed throughout the interior, the hempcrete will provide a dramatic earthy look, but this relies on the building process going perfectly. But, just a few months into Sarah's eight-month schedule, her plan to move in before winter is scuppered as her inexperience as a project manager starts to show. With material costs going through the roof, and her budget doing likewise, selling her one-bed holiday cottage looks like the only way to keep building. As the critical hemp process gets going, and proves increasingly tortuous and unpredictable, the success of Sarah's project hangs in the balance.
- 09
Piers and Emma build the first new listed castle in the UK for 100 years, complete with a tower, moat and futuristic tech. It's the biggest ever Grand Design, so is even their £2m budget enough?
- 10
Kevin McCloud revisits Stuart and Rosie Treasurer from Wirral, who he first met in 2016 when they set out to transform a small bungalow from a 1960s dormer into a slick piece of 21st-century architecture. The plan saw the couple decapitate the building and balance a new floating timber box on top to create five bedrooms, spending as little as possible on plumbing, electrics and insulation, but stress levels spiralled when neighbours grumbled at the ultra-modern creation. Nine years on, Kevin sees how Stuart and Rosie are getting on.
- 11
After artist and teacher Michelle Parsons recovered from serious illness, she and her architect husband David decided it was time to seize the day and build the private hideaway they'd always yearned for. David devised a sleek, black-clad, three bedroom house for a beautiful plot in an Essex woodland, with a separate studio for Michelle. The couple project manage the build, which gets off to a sticky start, including a dangerous gas leak and torrential rain. As the building finally starts to take shape, the big question remains - by choosing to eliminate windows on two sides of the property, could their new home turn out to be just a gloomy bunker?
- 12
Paul Rimmer has worked with bricks for 40 years renovating Victorian houses in Bolton. But now he plans to hand-build a state-of-the-art wooden home. If his funding holds up that is.
- 13
Revisited - Somerset: Cow Shed
Kevin McCloud returns one year later to see the progress of private chef Ed Versluys and Pilates instructor Vicky Anderson, who wanted to convert a concrete cowshed in the Somerset countryside into a three bedroom home. With the help of one young builder and the knowledge they can learn from the Internet, the couple planed to project manage the conversion themselves. However, they had only seven months and a budget of just over £200,000 to make a warm and comfortable home with straw bale walls and wide expanses of glass.
- 14
South East London: Victorian Dairy House
Beth and Andrew rescue a crumbling Victorian dairy, hoping to make it into a 'shabby chic' family home fit for modern life. But is the building simply too derelict?
- 15
Blackdown Hills, Devon: Snake House
This is one of the most ambitious homes ever seen on Grand Designs - a scaly, curving house that's reminiscent of a giant coiled snake. Stephen Tetlow is head of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. Stephen's wife Elizabeth is a committed horticulturalist. Together they want to build a home that reflects their passions - one that pushes Stephen's engineering skills to the limit and embraces Elizabeth's deep affinity with nature. Taking inspiration from an ammonite shell found on their land in the beautiful Blackdown Hills in Devon, the house spirals onto the landscape over two levels and mixes natural materials with cutting edge technology. Construction of such a complex curving structure proves a huge challenge and progress is tortuously slow.
- 16
Joe and Lina's clever space-saving low-budget build may be the smallest two-bedroom house you're allowed to build in London, but it'll be stylish, and theirs - not a landlord's.
- 17
Leominster: Amphitheatre Farmhouse
Chiropractor Steph Wilson has spent 20 years dreaming of living on her grandfather's farmland in Leominster, Herefordshire, which was sold when she was 16. Steph and her husband Alex have re-mortgaged their current house to buy back 27 acres of the farm. Steph has secured planning permission for a sleek contemporary cantilevered farmhouse in the old gravel pit where she played as a child. She is determined to give her two young children a version of the blissful childhood she had. Steph and Alex are told their ambitious design will cost £500k - twice what they can borrow. Regardless, the family take a leap of faith and move into a draughty old caravan on site. It's supposed to be a temporary solution. But after six months, caravan life is starting to look like it could become permanent. The family are in desperate need of a saviour, or their dream could turn into a nightmare. Then along comes Steph's oldest friend.
- 18
Identical twins Nik and Jon Daughtry run a graphic design company together. They drive the same car and even own identical dogs. Now these two brothers are building two near identical houses next door to each other in Sheffield. Raised up on steel stilts on the site of an old corn mill, the houses pay tribute to Sheffield's industrial past. Huge steel frames with exposed blockwork and black steel cladding should create two sleek and modern family homes. But Nik and Jon's plan is incredibly ambitious. Not only do they want to build the two houses for the price of one, but the materials and finish have to be absolutely perfect. With a tight budget, it's an almighty stretch from the start. As delays, overages and imperfections hit, it's clear the twins' intuitive and incredibly close relationship will be tested like never before.
- 19
Edward and Hazel plan a shining white art deco lighthouse on a rugged beautiful clifftop. But almost immediately their wildly optimistic plan runs into trouble.In one of Grand Designs most disaster-laden projects, Edward and Hazel Short looked to build a vast lighthouse-inspired home in Croyde, on a crumbling clifftop the North Devon coastline. The grand plans for the build saw loans of £3 million taken out to fund the project, but with setbacks and delays, the money was soon gone, leaving the building half-finished. Edward estimated that it would take another £2 million to complete the build.
- 20
Kevin McCloud follows more of Britain's most ambitious self-building projects, as intrepid individuals attempt to design and construct the home of their dreams. In this first edition, Kevin meets former army captain Justin, who has spent £1.8million on an abandoned neo-Gothic cemetery keeper's lodge and adjoining ex-council toilet block in south-west London. Justin's vision is to restore the lodge but demolish the ugly toilet blocks and replace them with an enormous luxury ground-floor extension, with an added moat and a giant basement with a swimming pool - all just metres from the nearest grave.
- 21
Kevin McCloud follows an ambitious build in Cornwall, as Leigh and Richard transform a derelict 17th century flour mill into a contemporary, three-bedroom home. They employ traditional craftsmen to start work on restoring the exterior, but it's not long before the true scale of the damage to the structure is revealed, and as the costs rise, they are forced to take more of the work themselves.
- 22
Kevin McCloud visits a couple planning to build a home that looks like a work of art overlooking a valley in south Devon. Joe and Claire's new home will be a giant sculpture inspired by the local landscape, 70 metres long and featuring 34 enormous angled zinc shards jutting out in all directions. It will also be complicated to build and equally as expensive. And although Joe is wealthy, ambitious and fearless, his team quickly come up against problems and the budget virtually doubles the first walls go up. Is his dream home in danger of become a nightmare?
- 23
Kevin McCloud returns to follow more ambitious home-design projects, beginning by meeting adventurous couple Colin and Adele. They have employed a Swedish architect, an Italian interior design company and a Latvian building company to complete the eye-popping curved glass family home in the Manchester suburb where they both grew up.
- 24
Kevin meets south London chef Corinne, who loves to entertain and is rustling up plans for a beautifully crafted, double-kitchen home designed around her love of cooking. The end-of-terrace plot is on a hill and surrounded by woodland within a strict conservation area, so it won't be an easy build. But having come through a divorce and cancer treatment, Corinne sees the house as vital on so many levels, not least as an opportunity to create a space that represents her new lease of life.
- 25
Kevin McCloud revisits Vicky and Ed, who in 2015 broke free from the shackles of their hectic London lives to try to build a new life in the Somerset countryside. With a budget of just over £200,000, they set out to transform an old derelict cowshed into a 21st-century off-grid smallholding. With no building experience or project manager, they took on this dramatic transformation themselves, learning building techniques from the internet.
