The property guru who’ll turn your home into a Lego prison
THE worst design crime any home can commit, according to presenter George Clarke in his new series, Ugly House To Lovely House (C4), is to be ‘ unsympathetic to its surroundings’.
Actually, I can think of a few worse ones — like provoking ridicule from the neighbours, and plunging the owners deep into debt.
Clarke encouraged young couple Sarah and Tony in the Vale of Glamorgan, with a toddler plus a baby on the way, to embark on a colossal project that included an extension that looked like a lopsided chapel. The weird structure took them £25,000 over budget — some of which, admitted Tony, he would have to fund with credit cards.
Now that really is a design crime. People in nearby houses in the picturesque village looked on aghast as the framework of the extension went up. ‘It’s a bit bonkers,’ said one woman, striving to be civil, ‘the kind of thing you might put together with Lego.’
The new room stood where the garage had been but, instead of being flush to the rest of the house, it lurched round at a 45-degree angle. There wasn’t a square corner in the place — every wall seemed to lean up against the next.
Sorry to be prosaic, but it looks like it’ll be a swine to hoover.
To convince his clients to accept the plans, George took them to see another extension that consisted of two boxes, a big one teetering on a little one. Top-heavy monstrosities are all the vogue these days, it appears: half the houses in my suburban street have added loft extensions that resemble giant beach huts bursting out of the attic space. It’s the invasion of the airborne sheds.
Allowing themselves to be persuaded, the couple set about finding a builder brave enough to tackle the project. Every plank and strut had to be individually cut to size. ‘There’s no template for funny angles,’ sighed the carpenter.
All this sent costs soaring. Perhaps Tony and Sarah could have stayed within their £60,000 budget if they’d opted for something more normal, but if the TV producers ever uttered one word of caution, we didn’t hear it on the show.
Property programmes like these ought to be obliged to provide sane financial advice, along with the wacky plans. It’s dangerously easy, when the cameras are rolling and a famous face off the telly is getting over-excited, to be carried away.
But TV shows must not be allowed to exploit their participants by tempting them to spend wildly.
Luckily, Tony and Sarah did have the good sense to draw the line at one piece of architect’s madness. The team wanted to dress their pebbledash walls with fashionable birch cladding — and the design recommended planks across one of the windows.
From inside, this looked like prison bars. From outside, it just looked weird. Thankfully, the idea was ditched.
Whether Jericho (ITV) will be ditched or brought back isn’t yet known, but as the first series ended the cast were clearly hopeful. Instead of conclusions, we were left with a mass of cliffhangers. Annie (Jessica Raine) told Johnny she loved him (Hans Matheson) but wouldn’t marry him — where does that leave their romance? Davey ( Stephen Thompson) was shot in the back on the way to his wedding — who pulled the trigger?
Will Charles ever walk again, did Ralph rig the mine to collapse and, if they don’t finish building the viaduct, how will anyone visit the Lake District by rail?
Trouble is, Jericho has struggled to win over 2.5 million viewers each week, while almost three times as many tune in to Death In Paradise on BBC1. It’s hardly surprising — one has scenery, flirting and a daft murder each week, while the other imagined a Wild West shanty town under leaden Yorkshire skies.
So it’s a certainty we’ll be seeing clumsy detective Humphrey Goodman again in his lethal Caribbean idyll. It’s less sure that Annie and Johnny will return to their bizarre hybrid of Wuthering Heights and Dodge City.
Still, at least their viaduct was designed by an old-fashioned Victorian architect. These days, the railway line would probably be laid in a daring, modern zig-zag.