OUR GRAND DESIGNS DISASTER Paralympian’s marriage crumbles due to stress of £600,000 build... which is now for sale!
As viewers of the Grand Designs TV property show witnessed, his marriage to wife Penny broke up in the middle of the £600,000 project.
And now the swimmer has been forced to put his ‘beautiful’ £1million family home up for sale rather than enjoy living in the property he had designed from scratch.
At the end of Wednesday night’s Channel 4 programme, Mr Butler, 50, admitted he still had to find somewhere for Mrs Butler, 48, and their three children to live and didn’t have the funds to buy anywhere.
During filming, he told presenter Kevin McCloud he would be living in the stylish four-bedroom house near Warwick with all the amenities, space and features a wheelchair user could hope for.
He admitted: ‘It’s been hard, it’s been difficult. If I did have to sell this that would be difficult. Everything we went through in our personal lives and to have this at the end of it and to be still civil and respectful to each other, I think is a big thing. I owe it me and I owe it to Pen to try and hang on to it.’
But with the property now listed online as being up for sale for ‘offers in excess of £1million’, it seems that the couple’s Grand Designs home has been sacrificed for the practicalities of divorce.
Mrs Butler was in tears on camera as she talked about the ‘weird’ situation and said they both ‘love each other and care for each other a massive amount’. Asked whether the project had put strain on the relationship, she said: ‘It would have been good if we’d concentrated on each other a long time ago. [The build] is a contributing factor.’
The couple lived for many years in a more traditional home next door, but Mr Butler found it difficult to get around in his wheelchair. A design engineer by profession, Mr Butler and his wife were inspired by an adjacent old barn to build an accessible home with a lift, space for a wheelchair and disabled-friendly facilities. They intended to sell their current property and inject £150,000 cash to fund the project. The barn was duly demolished and building work began on Mr Butler’s dream home.
But as the Channel 4 show revealed, their plans were thrown into chaos when the couple split halfway through the project – which Mrs Butler was supervising.
In August 2018, he said: ‘Me and Penny have decided to separate.’ They decided he should live in the new house when it was complete. ‘It was our dream but I’m the lucky one,’ he said. ‘We are still best of friends, she has been brilliant on this.’
Mrs Butler continued to oversee the building work until it was completed. But the split complicated their plans and they remain owners of the old house that was supposed to fund the new one. Mr Butler, who was paralysed from the waist down in a motorbike crash, took part in the 1988 Seoul Paralympics and the Barcelona games four years later. He has spent his career designing sports cars and racing bikes. With a specially designed bathroom, kitchen and wheelchairfriendly concrete floors, the home he built should have enabled him to live in comfort. He had been hoping to cut back on work, but will now continue full-time.
Mr Butler told the programme: ‘The whole idea of this was for me to semi-retire. Unfortunately I’ll have to carry on working for a little bit longer so I can sort Penny out.’
Presenter McCloud described the design as ‘truly inspirational’.
‘Care for each other a massive amount’