Television
A brick-by-brick restoration ensures a legacy and cements personal connections in post-quake Christchurch.
In the best Grand Designs episodes, there is a resonance that goes beyond mere renovation; a piece of someone’s heart in the masonry. That’s the case in the Grand Designs New Zealand (Three, Wednesday, 7.30pm) season-opener on Wednesday.
Many New Zealanders will have heard of the visionary engineer and motorcycle designer John Britten. Fewer will know that before his early death from skin cancer, he lived with his family in a Victorian stables he converted to a home over 15 years, filling it with fittings that reflected the same unique visual-spatial thinking the world saw in the Britten V1000.
But the triple-brick building was badly damaged in the Christchurch earthquakes and his family were faced with a difficult and expensive restoration – or the easier option of levelling it and starting again.
Britten’s daughter Isabelle Weston and her husband Tim decided to do the renovation.
Among the challenges for Weston was the question of what to keep in a building whose elements actually embodied who her father was.
“It was very difficult,” she says. “A lot of the time it was quite costly or hard to hang on to the things that dad had originally built and we were fighting to save a lot of those.
“We had to weigh up what we could afford to save of the elements that he’d done and what we had to let go of.”
Perhaps inevitably, their original budget proved inadequate and Weston admits that, had they known what the real cost would be, they might never have embarked on the project.
She says the decision to not only take on the project, but share the experience on television was an acknowledgement of both the continuing interest in her father’s work and the wider story of Christchurch’s renewal and recovery.
Her husband saw people killed in collapsing buildings
during the February 2011 quake and was later diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder. “Tim’s experience was quite traumatic and hard to move forward from.
“When we first decided to keep the house and stay in Christchurch, I felt like Christchurch had become more of a person to me.
“It’s more of a personal connection than it ever was, more than a place. It’s a feeling.”
The links didn’t stop there. The couple didn’t know until the day they met series host Chris Moller that he had his own personal connection to Britten’s work.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the new season of Grand Designs New Zealand gets off to a meaningful start.