Grand Designs – Season 14

Grand Designs (now on season 14) follows intrepid home-builders as they pursue their architectural dreams. Designer and writer Kevin McCloud guides us through the trials and tribulations – physical, financial and emotional – of those obsessively trying to create a unique place to live, often over many months, even years.

Grand Designs is as enthralling and diverse as ever. It opens with one of the largest builds featured so far – a magnificent modernist pavilion in Sussex built by a man obsessed with every detail.

To follow there’s a young couple wrangling a derelict cowshed into their first home in Somerset, a rusty “floating” barn overcoming local opposition in Lewes, and a giant fortress of a house on the beach in the Isle of Wight.

There’s an outback-style stilt house on the marshes in East Sussex, for a builder who loves boats and hates houses, and a sweeping curved straw-bale conversion of an old forge for a family in County Antrim. And that’s not forgetting the man determined to make a damp dark cave in the Wyre Forest into a home fit for 21st-century living. Kevin McCloud is on hand to witness the trials and tribulations of those willing to put everything on the line to build homes they hope will transform their lives.

Episode 1

Jon Martin and Noreen Jaafar’s minds set out to build a big modern treehouse. It will have stilts screwed into the earth to avoid the roots and balconies high up where they can literally touch the branches.

Episode 2

Matt and Sophie White want to build a giant family house of fun for themselves and their three children. It will be a mysterious black, zinc-clad home kitted out with all sorts of fun things.   

Episode 3

Tom and Danielle decide to build a wavy wooden house. It will have curvy steam-bent cladding, twisty hand-made furniture and interior walls covered with naturally weathered timber from their woodland.

Episode 4

Michelle Parsons and her architect husband David decided it was time to seize the day and build the private hideaway – a black-clad house with no windows on the front and along one side, so no-one could ever see in.

Episode 5

Bricklayer Paul Rimmer is turning his back on his beloved bricks. He wants to hand-build a state-of-the-art contemporary home for £350k – not out of brick but out of wood.

Episode 6

Can you really build a Grand Design when you’ve only got £500 to start with? That’s what Simon and Jasmine Dale had in the bank when they started to build their family house. 

Episode 7

If you want to make life tricky, try building a new house with a huge, complex curvy roof. That’s exactly what Mark and Candida Diacono and their daughter Nell are doing. 

Episode 8

Stuart and Rosie Treasurer plan to dramatically decapitate their bungalow – cutting the roof off to leave just the walls, then balance a big new floating timber box on top to create more bedrooms. 

Episode 9

Can you really convert a cowshed into a home by learning everything from the internet? Kevin McCloud revisits private chef Ed Versluys and Pilates instructor Vicky Anderson who tried to do just that.