A house like a multi-storey car park? Wrong on so many levels
As ProPerTY sales pitches go, it wasn’t enticing: ‘This house features three different kinds of concrete in the master bedroom.’ Architect Piers Taylor was in raptures at the Modernist newbuild in Florida’s south Beach, close to the spot where Gianni versace was murdered. This house with its brutalist bedroom was the last to be showcased on The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes (BBc2), and Piers loved it.
The place looked like a deathtrap to me. Not only were there fewer soft furnishings than in osama Bin Laden’s mountain cave, but half the walls were missing. The house was open on three sides to a courtyard and garden: any intruder who scaled the outer wall could walk straight in.
even the overgrown bush by the front door was known as a Florida strangler Tree. How could you ever relax there?
every one of the houses lauded by Piers and his co- presenter, actress caroline Quentin, was unwelcoming and uncomfortable. This show is like Location, Location, Location for fans of sixties shopping centres — cement wastelands with the aesthetic appeal of a hollow breezeblock.
The first cost an incredible $30 million (£23 million), and looked like a former multi-storey car-park converted into a Hilton hotel. All the decor was bland and corporate: the bedroom block was a series of rooms backing onto a 100ft corridor. Then we explored a halffinished electricity sub- station, with a trough for a swimming pool in the middle of the open-plan living room.
The fun of this show is watching Piers and caroline pant in ecstasies over the hideous designs. Look, the walls and the ceiling in this one don’t meet — Piers says it offers ‘infinite vistas’. Personally, I like an infinite vista, in the form of a nice window with a view. Holes in the roof are less appealing.
These designs might not keep the rain out, but they do shed light on why Britain has been blighted with so many migraine- inducing skyscrapers and office blocks since the sixties. Architecture students are brainwashed into believing that ugly is beautiful.
It’s all part of the snobbery of those with more education than common sense, who think they can show off their superiority by praising the improbable — whether that is tiny beige splodges of cordon bleu cookery, or shredded denim jeans at £800 a pair.
What they don’t realise is that the rest of us are doubled up with laughter.
The muffled sounds of laughter were evident in True Horror (c4), a tale taken from the archives of a paranormal research society in sussex. The investigators interviewed two teenage boys who reported hearing ghastly shrieks and seeing apparitions after spending the night camping near a churchyard, said to be on the site of a medieval plague pit.
Trouble was, the boys were self-confessed pranksters. Their idea of a hoot was to video each other committing pretend murders, with lots of groaning and gurning — like rik Mayall in a remake of the Texas chainsaw Massacre.
The lads’ testimony didn’t seem exactly convincing. They claimed a spectral ten-year-old, all in white, floated through their tent at 3am — ‘I’d never experienced anything quite like this in my life,’ said one. Not a regular occurence, then?
This was an obvious hoax. If this is the best True Horror can offer, it’s a pity, because the first episode — chronicling the scary phenomena that accompanied a middle-aged father’s mental breakdown at a remote Welsh cottage — was thought-provoking. This one was just silly.