Grand Designs: Huxham (Season 19 FTA Premiere ABC TV Sun 17 April 2022)

Huxham: This new series of Grand Designs features wildly different cutting-edge homes and dramatic personal stories.

All throughout Kevin McCloud is on hand to guide us through the trials and tribulations of creating extraordinary, highly personal places to live no matter the odds.

Few of us would think of building their home to look like a work of art, but on a hill overlooking a beautiful valley in South Devon Joe and Claire are going to do just that. Their new house 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 be complicated and expensive to build, but Joe is young, wealthy and ambitious, as well as fearless. He intends to invest a large part of his self-made fortune into making the impossible possible. His aim is to build “one of the greatest homes on the planet”.

But with huge ambition can come huge risk, and right from the start the problems are mind boggling. Major structural engineering changes are necessary to contend with high winds hitting the shards, and the £835,000 budget virtually doubles before the first walls go up. A team of local builders then struggle through all weathers to build a vast intricate wooden frame, but the prefabricated timbers simply won’t fit together. As delays mount, what should have been a masterpiece is in real danger of becoming a white elephant.

Airdate: Sunday 17 April 2022 at 7.40pm on ABC TV.

Season 19 Episode 1