Grand Designs (1999–…): Season 13, Episode 2 - The Miniature Hollywood Mansion, North London - full transcript
For a decade Jonathan Broom has dreamed of building his own home in London. Meanwhile he lived with his wife and now two children in a one room apartment they planned to rent for six months...
If you live in a city
- London, for example -
then you'll be familiar with
the problem of lack of space.
People traditionally, of course,
have solved this by going up.
There's a two-storey extension
just there.
But supposing you did the opposite.
Supposing instead of going up
you went down,
and you put half of your house
underground.
Jonathan Broome and his wife
Deborah Sheridan-Taylor,
have been scouring London for a
building plot for almost a decade.
If ever we saw any developments
going on,
we'd stop and peek in
and always fantasise about -
"Wow, they found...
How do you find that plot of land?"
Jonathan runs an eco-taxi company,
but his real obsession has always
been to build his own home.
I think I can honestly say that
probably every day
for the last 10 years
I have sat and thought about this.
While they've been looking, actress
Deborah has become a full-time mum
in their one-room apartment.
We only moved in here literally
to be here for six months,
and we've outgrown this space,
I think.
We got married and had a baby
and then another baby...
and we're still here.
And that's it. We've literally...
Life has happened while we have been
waiting for life to happen.
Jonathan is so determined to build
his own place,
he spent years compiling a detailed
scrapbook
of his ideal nonexistent home.
I think I horrified the architect
when it landed on his desk.
The house that we're trying to build
is really like a list of dreams.
Until that list of dreams
becomes a reality...
Come on, girls, let's go corridor!
..the children have to make do with
the corridor they use as a garden.
Under the bridge,
quick, quick, quick! Come on.
The opportunity to be able
to open a door, and go outside...
It is going to be wonderful!
After 10 years of searching,
however,
they have finally found
a tiny plot in north London.
So you enter your site through a
gate underneath somebody's bedroom?
Yeah. Yes.
It's quite narrow, isn't it?
Jonathan and Deborah paid
£405,000 for a plot
of less than a 10th of an acre.
Welcome to our rubbish dump.
LAUGHTER
Full of buddleia.
How do you feel now, as owners
of this very beautiful triangle?
It's on the cusp of making
a long-time-dream real.
So what's down here? Have you
ever been to the back of the site?
We've actually never been right to
the end of the site. Oh, come on!
No. Please, you be the first.
Be careful, though.
Gosh, an old shoe. I'm sure
we'll find a body in here!
I'm not joking.
It goes down to a very narrow point
at the end.
It is, isn't it? Really narrow!
It's a very, very sharp
pointy triangle.
Yup. Here we are -
I've got my machete.
Such is the scarcity
and the price of land in London,
they'll be using every inch of the
small awkward wedge-shaped site.
And what they want to do is squeeze
in an ambitious 3-storey home.
First, they'll need to demolish
a staggering 14 neighbours' walls
to excavate the whole plot up
to the boundary.
A huge retaining wall around
the perimeter
will then encase and anchor the
6m deep basement into the ground.
This floor will be crammed with
a labyrinth of rooms -
two studies opening onto a
courtyard,
a self-contained nanny flat,
a gym,
and the greatest indulgence -
a subterranean, 12m lap pool.
A guest bedroom will open onto
a second courtyard.
The two courtyards, along with
a glass-roofed internal staircase,
will suck some much-needed light
into the basement.
Above ground,
the party walls get rebuilt
and against one of them,
Jonathan and Deborah will construct
the houses middle floor,
slightly sunken down and glazed
along one entire length
to pull more light in.
Inside, a small playroom will sit
alongside a comfortable kitchen
and living room.
Meanwhile, the third storey,
pops its head above the parapet.
It'll contain three bedrooms
and two bathrooms,
with views and a balcony
overlooking their small garden.
The need to respect everybody's
privacy,
including the neighbours',
means inward-facing windows
and skylights.
And a low profile for the building.
Which is mainly buried,
like half-submerged submarine.
So where are we standing,
for example, here?
We are literally on the corner
of the ground and first floor.
But below us something is going on,
isn't there?
The whole plot is excavated
for the basement.
The whole plot?! The whole plot.
Not just the bit underneath
this building? No.
50% of the building itself
is in the basement.
If on the ground floor you've got
your kitchen, sitting room, etc,
and on the first floor,
your bedrooms,
what happens in the basement?
We are installing a small gym,
a study, and a nice swimming pool.
Like an adult playground.
We just wanted to fill the space
with everything we've ever wanted.
And what's inspired it? Well,
I lived in Los Angeles for quite a
long time,
and I always adores those beautiful
houses.
And I always loved the light
in those sort of houses.
We love light. Light is the most
vital and important part
of the whole build.
So you build underground, yeah(!)
No, but with amazing sources.
That's been a main point -
that we have as much opportunity
to bring light into the house.
Because in Los Angeles there is
a lot more light than in London.
Jonathan's going to take out a loan
to help cover the £650,000 budget.
But I'm wondering if that's enough,
given the horrible logistics of this
site.
We are literally building...
The whole plot is being excavated,
so right up to the wall.
So this comes down.
And so it's IN their garden?
This is why we're taking down
every wall.
Essentially, we're going to have
to do is underpin every single wall
here.
You're expecting to go
into everybody's garden,
to be able to build your house?
By how far?
I think it's going to be
approximately a metre.
But, if I lived there, I'd have to
sacrifice a very lovely palm tree.
But, obviously,
we have to put it back.
Or a garden shed, or something.
What everyone has.
We're hoping to be part
of a community here.
We're not developing it and selling
it on to somebody else,
and who cares what anyone feels.
We both desperately care about...
Massively. It's massively important.
We don't want to be
the...hated neighbours.
There are 17 separate party wall
agreements.
Land grabbing,
no matter how temporary,
is not the ideal way to begin
community relations.
Now, this plot is in Camden.
And I cannot stress to you
enough just how difficult it is
to find a plot so close
to the centre of London.
It does, of course,
come with its stings in the tail.
For example, they're having to
really push everything they're doing
to the very edges of the boundary
of the site.
And even beyond.
They're trying to excavate into
their neighbours' gardens.
And they have 17 party wall
agreements to negotiate
in order to be able to do that.
That is the land they bought...
this is in land they are
negotiating on.
And this here... What's this?
Oh, this is the red mist
descending on numbers 23 and 25...
Oh, and 37.
Ouch.
Not surprisingly, six months later
they're still negotiating.
But some progress has been made.
The Roper family, for example,
have already signed up.
Were you surprised at being asked
to give over
a metre of your own garden? Yes.
I, personally, was.
I thought, "Oh, my God, you know.
"Got to give a metre over of our
garden, you know.
"We're going to be...squashed."
But, end of the day,
it'll all go back.
You know, its disruption,
but as long as it does go back,
then it's not that big a deal.
We are OK with it for the moment.
It takes 10 months of careful
negotiation for all 17 neighbours
to finally agree terms.
10 months of waiting for work
finally begin.
Literally, every week
I have genuinely believed
we were going to start.
It's been very, very tough.
Today they can start to delicately
unpick all their neighbours' walls.
Firstly, we need to clear it,
which we are doing today.
Then we're going to get into each
garden, take the wall down...
With it, I think
it looks a little smaller.
Their contractor Grazian
will be managing the site,
but even for a seasoned builder
like him
this is no straightforward project.
Party walls... We're used to having
two, maybe three.
But having 17
is above the norm, for us.
Jonathan's taken it upon himself to
be the community liaison officer,
dispensing charm and tact
to all around.
Is for anything else we can do?
Do you want anything else to go?
Whenever I come down I try
and knock on a few people doors.
Please, give me a call
if you need anything.
I just want it to proceed
as well is it can.
With as little disruption to
everybody as possible.
Is she OK? Yeah. Very nice.
Negotiating all the party walls has
needed to be resourced with time
and with thousands of pounds.
There's no doubt this is
a costly and complicated building.
Paul Archer as the architect
for the design.
It just strikes me as a particularly
ambitious project.
Is it a 650,000...
It strikes me as more.
I reckon you could double
what he's got to spend.
He could get to 1.2 million easily.
Basically, I think we
trying to do a building
which is £1 million, but for less.
We will spend his budget,
and then we will stop.
Every last penny.
The question is how far we get.
My concern is that he gets as far
as ground level,
and the contingencies and problems
that he discovers in the ground,
swallow this budget.
And if there is no more money
this half doesn't get built. Yep.
That's a definite possibility.
Can they take occupation?
Can they live in this underground?
You probably could do if you had to,
yes.
But I don't think they'll want to.
You know there is an inescapable
truth about this project.
There's Jonathan wanting to spend
£650,000,
there's the architect saying
it's going to cost a million,
I think they could easily spend 1.2.
And if it goes over budget...
what happens?
They never get out of the ground.
Who wants to live in a submarine?
Who wants to live in a house
where you can never...
you can never surface for air?
Jonathan and Deborah have started to
build their London home
with the highest hopes of meeting
their ?650,000 budget.
They've agreed a fixed-price
contract with Grazian
for the first phase,
the basement.
But by my reckoning, Jonathan, who
admittedly is a canny businessman,
still doesn't have enough
money to finish the house.
A month in and all the
neighbours' garden walls have been
taken down and replaced with
a temporary hoarding.
Hello, you two.
Long time no see, eh?
How are you doing? Very well,
how are you? Mmmwah!
It's a year, you know that?
Yeah, just under a year.
Well, getting on for.
And you built a tree house.
We have a wonderful tree house, yes.
The entire plot will be excavated,
so they've had to fit their site
office in a neighbour's tree.
Our children think this is
the house we are building.
HE LAUGHS
They think we've done it.
"That was quick!"
It's perfect, it's in a tree too.
With a lovely view of your rubble
yard. Yeah. And how has it been?
In relation to the neighbours?
Yeah.
Well, everyone has pretty much
been very supportive.
We've obviously tried to
be as accommodating as we can.
And the budget?
Is it as tight as it ever was?
I think it's probably going to come
in at a little bit more than...
we thought. Which means?
For a change! What a surprise.
I don't know yet.
It's gone up
because I didn't appreciate quite how
expensive it is to dig such a big
hole and fill it with concrete.
Nothing on this
project is going to be cheap.
The groundworks and basement alone
cost almost 400,000.
But no excavation can take place
until a series
of concrete piles are drilled
around the perimeter of the whole
site,
forming a retaining exterior wall to
hold up the neighbours' gardens.
Hello, Grazian. Hello, Kevin.
This well is biblical!
How are they getting on with the
piling? On average, ten piles a day.
How many do you need to do
altogether? 180 all in.
You might hope it would ease
off a bit before you start pouring
the concrete. It's a
very wet slurry mix, isn't it?
It's meant to be.
It's designed that way.
Good, cos it's getting wetter in
this weather. Shouldn't be
a problem at all.
Two months later
and the piling is complete,
but there is a significant problem.
It was unclear in their planning
permission as to where
they should determine ground level.
As a result, there is
a risk they might not be
digging down far enough.
The house could exceed its height
restrictions
so Grazian has to dig down further
and adopt an entirely new strategy.
The issue we have with going that
extra half a metre,
that takes us
over the safe limit of excavation,
which means we have to prop
the 17 gardens we have,
we have to install propping,
shoring, something to hold
the earth back so that the gardens
do not fall in on us.
This is bad news for Grazian.
It will cost him
dear in terms of time and materials
and cut into his fixed margin.
I would never have chosen
to do this method.
If we knew from the start
exactly where we were,
what we had to do...which has now
caused the need for a makeshift,
as-you-go-along builder platform,
which I'm very unhappy with.
The lack of clarity in a previous
planning concept has led to
this big headache for everyone,
not least for the architect, Paul.
The issue which has meant they are
now going down another 700mm
in height, to get a new lower level,
how did that happen? You saw the
site when you first came here.
It was quite difficult to get an
accurate survey on what was
already here.
And very difficult to get
the actual heights of all
the individual gardens because
we couldn't get access to them.
So who picks up the cost,
then, of going to the extra 700mm?
Well, it's a mixture of factors.
But certainly the client will end up
catching some of it.
So Jonathan is having to pay for it,
is he?
I'm sure he's not happy about it,
but that's what a contingency sum
is about.
He's a very good negotiator.
Jonathan is desperate to save money
and so he's started to take
more time out from his eco-taxi
company to get more hands-on.
Where I think my skills lie
is just constantly
working on the budget, trying
to stretch it that bit more,
trying to figure out what savings
we can make.
Where should the money be spent?
And try to negotiate a better price.
That is in essence what I do and what
I spend most of the time doing.
At five, I had a stall outside
my house selling orange juice.
It's just something I seemed to be
quite successful at.
Jonathan is putting more and more
of his time into the project.
Deborah can't quite match that.
Why do we always have to
talk about the house, the house,
and what's going to happen?
It's like...
you know, it's
kind of like the love of his life.
When I can see a shape, that will
be when my love affair...
will begin, I think.
However, Deborah is fully employed
as joint community liaison officer.
We spent the whole weekend
making banana bread,
and sent Jonathan and the girls went
and delivered them.
Didn't you, Macky? Did you go and
give cakies to our new neighbours?
Yes.
Not everyone was there last time
we made the banana bread, so
I decided to make a few more to say
once again "We're so appreciative."
Today the neighbours'
walls are being rebuilt
and the hoardings are coming down.
Deborah
and Jonathan can return the land
they borrowed over five months ago.
Their extensive charm campaign
seems to have worked.
We've had hardly any,
if any complaints,
and it just seems as
if we had no neighbours around us.
It's now six months
since they started
and excavation of the gargantuan
basement has no end, it seems.
By going deeper, we've doubled
the time to get things in and out.
It just gets harder
and more labour-intensive.
This hole is a monstrous size.
It's not a house, it's a
civil engineering project.
How often do you make it onto site?
Three or four times a week.
Because it is rocketing on now,
isn't it?
I have to check that it still here.
Check the hole's still here.
My God, that is a hole!
Cavernous, isn't it?
It's like being inside the prow
of great concrete ship.
I don't think I've ever visited
a house as sunken as this,
one which is so buried. And what
will we be in when the house is
finished?
I think was standing in...in a
spare bedroom. Good. At the moment.
It's often said that
when constructing,
you never quite know how much money
you are going to spend
until you're out of the ground.
And of course here,
you never will be!
You were thinking of spending
altogether something like 650
to begin with.
Yeah, it was that kind of price
without any contingencies
in it in an ideal world.
It's something approaching
maybe 850 maybe, to...
Yeah, that's probably... If you want
to kit it out the way you want to.
Yeah, which we are going to try
to do.
If we can borrow money and
we can get
it together to finish it now, we're
going to do our utmost to do that.
You get the risk, though,
that you end up with a basement
you don't use or a building
which is half finished, yeah?
Well, two-thirds finished,
hopefully.
Finished and you just owe
a great load of money.
Finished
and we owe a lot of money, yeah.
But it's a calculated risk
and I don't think I'm reckless...
No, in the current climate
I salute you for it.
After a whole seven
months of digging,
the excavation of the six-metre
basement is complete.
Finally they can start to build
their underground home.
It feels like a major day today,
doesn't it? Yeah.
It's moving out of phase
digging, digging digging.
Don't you think there's
an energy here today?
We are finally actually putting
in the first bit of the house.
Quite excited about today.
I just discovered from Grazian that
they have four hours in which to
play around before it sets.
It then takes four years
to fully set.
To dry. To fully set? Four years?
Who knew?
A month later,
Jonathan makes a radical decision.
He's calculated that getting
a loan to include
his 200,000 shortfall
will cost too much.
Instead, he's decided
on an alternative way to finance
the project.
I sold my company. I think my heart
went from it a bit and sort of...
I fell in love with this. My wife
would say that I am a big risk taker.
She would probably say that
I'm the biggest...
Well, she has said that I take more
risks than anyone that she knows.
But in my blissful ignorance it never
has crossed my mind
that I couldn't not finish it.
Good girl, well done.
At this precise moment, Deborah
doesn't share Jonathan's optimism.
Jonathan not working...and putting
everything into this house,
it's suddenly become a little bit
sort of more scary.
I've always trusted him.
You know, I hope he's not
sort of overstretched itself.
Do you want to come through
the little hole?
Sometimes we have massive fights
and we say, "Is it worth it?
"Is it worth it?
What is it all for?"
We're going crazy trying to do
this and have we taken on too much?
I suppose it's all coming together.
We haven't built a house yet, so...
..who knows?
Jonathan and Deborah are eight
months into the construction
of their half-buried
house in North London.
This gigantic, double-skinned
basement is being
wrapped in a waterproof membrane
and is being packed with
so much insulation, there'll be no
need for conventional heating.
We're over the moon now we're
starting to put everything
back in - we're actually building
something now.
The next stage will be to pour
the internal skin of the basement
walls, which need reinforcing with
vast amounts of steel.
The key with these walls is
the preparation. We need to get
this absolutely spot-on -
it needs to be incredibly solid.
The minute something cracks, doesn't
hold, we've got a major problem,
so we can't afford
for that to happen.
Next up
comes a complex wooden mould,
strong enough to hold something
like 200 tonnes of wet concrete.
It's incredible,
the kind of symmetry of it all and
it's like a kind of maze
going in there.
After weeks of painstaking
preparation, today
the walls will be poured.
It's of course vital that the wooden
mould doesn't fracture under
the weight of the concrete.
Any failure could be calamitous,
dangerous and expensive for Grazian.
My margins are incredibly
tight in terms of time frame -
everything has been worked out quite
efficiently and to keep the
price down, in order to win
us the work,
so we don't have much
room for error.
But it isn't long before there's
a problem.
CREAKING
Stop! Stop, stop, stop.
HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
There were some sort of creaks
and crunchy sounds,
so they've stopped
everything straightaway.
That's a tremendous amount
of pressure, so we're trying to
figure out exactly where that is
and what, if there is an issue.
What's come up? Just the...
The whole wall.
The whole timber wall has gone up.
So much pressure has actually moved
the shuttering up.
If this timber shuttering breaks,
there'll be an avalanche
of concrete.
We've used thousands
and thousands of screws.
Unfortunately, it looks like we're
missing one screw somewhere.
Now it's level.
HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
Fortunately, Grazian's team have
spotted the fracture in time,
which they need to contain and
reinforce with more
screws and fixings.
With luck, the basement will,
within hours, have walls.
Two weeks later, they're ready to
pour the ground floor slab,
forming a lid on top
of the basement.
The lower ground floor has already
swallowed up nearly two thirds
of their original budget, and they
still have two more floors to build.
It's a little
bit like standing at ground level
when you first bought the site,
isn't it? It is, it is.
All those months of work to get back
to where you were, almost. Yup.
And the money situation just changed
entirely, hasn't it?
Did you add enough from selling
the business?
I don't really know,
is the honest answer.
It's not going to be
completely outright.
We should be able to get cheaper
finance at the end of it,
if there is a shortfall of an extra
50 or 100 or 200 or whatever it is.
It should be OK.
Are you, kind of,
excited by the idea of
Jonathan selling his share or
is it sort of worrying?
Worrying when you don't have
anyone in the family working.
That can be slightly worrying.
He does sit at home a lot going...
Adding things up in his head.
His parents are petrified -
they have stopped asking questions.
I think, eventually, they'll just
come here and hopefully see a house
at the end of it.
But his father just shudders.
Jonathan is prepared to risk a
great deal to build this house.
After all, this has been
an obsession for the last ten years.
Let's hope both the money
and the design of this
half-underground home work out.
Right now, I think it's very hard
to figure this out.
At the moment, it just feels
troglodytic. It's exciting.
It's all in here,
isn't it, Jonathan?
In your imagination, you can see
it all. Every detail. I guess so.
Well, I've been poring over plans
and things for years. And?
I... It's not in here yet.
I am still sort of slightly...
It's a cold,
damp basement with no light.
You've yet to fall in love with it.
I'm yet to fall in love with
this bit, yeah.
Jonathan is now working
full-time on the project in an
effort to cut costs.
No, not that I know of.
I'm spending most of my time trying
to get the best price that I can.
That's right.
I push things as hard as I can
without it breaking.
Now, Jonathan is at home all day,
both business
and family life have
to take place in this one room.
It's very hard with the children
here and me here
and phones ringing and
stuff like that.
Daddy always on the phone?
Yeah.
So, it's not the
greatest environment.
But after 11 months,
their new home seems to be
finally coming up for air.
The structure for the next two
storeys is up.
Well, what a change, eh? Look,
platform. Floor, solid. And this!
Now the excitement is mounting,
because I can actually
visualise that that is going to
be our balcony from our bedroom.
That's going to be our playroom
and this is our garden that we're
standing in.
You don't feel too hemmed in?
No, I like that feeling,
I feel quite secure.
My biggest fear was that it was like
a, sort of, fishbowl and we'll be
peered in on all the time, but I'm
actually really comfortable now.
If you put a recliner here,
your head would be actually...
Do know what? I can't
see a single window.
You couldn't be seen.
Well, this is why we did it,
you know, for Jonathan,
with his whole nudist thing.
It's perfect.
He only ever sunbathes totally nude.
Congratulations, Jonathan. You'll be
able to get all over, even tan.
DEBORAH LAUGHS
And with the end seemingly in sight,
Jonathan's negotiated
a deal on some hi-tech bathrooms.
If I show you this
particular toilet, sir...
It is a little bit
different from a normal toilet seat.
You will notice,
when you sit down, it's warm.
So rather than being heated, because
someone has sat there before you...
That's so lovely.
It's heated to your own
temperature, so especially...
Oh, it's so warm.
If I press this button here,
that says "Rear".
There is a wand unit that pops out
and washes you. Hello.
Despite the budget overruns, they
are determined not to compromise.
We've got one chance to do it,
so, to do it right,
to do the house justice,
I have to absolutely maximise what
I can do and what I can get.
After 15 months of
relentless building,
the structure of this house
is complete.
But there are still no windows
and, until they are installed,
they can't get on to
the final finishes.
Look, there's water pouring into
all of your drains.
When are you going to move in? We
have a date of the 15th of November.
That's six weeks away. Yeah.
You've got no windows.
But what we're thinking...
But, Kevin, we are thinking we'll
move in...
Hopefully, if the glass comes in,
we'll have this floor and upstairs.
But there's so much to do.
Everything is in place. We just have
to now basically put up the walls.
No, Deborah, everything is
not in place. It's not?
Everything's very much not in place.
There is no plasterboard in place.
But how long does it take to
plasterboard?
That doesn't take long.
Probably a week for that
and then you've got second fits,
you've got all the furniture to put
in, got the glazing to put in.
We want to get in here.
What drives you to try and get
in here sooner rather than later?
If you don't push, then...
So, it's about driving the project?
I think so, yeah.
Set deadlines for the builders. Yes.
And enough, already. We're
talking about the house. Enough!
We want to move in and start living.
This is a tall order for Grazian.
There's no way this building
will be habitable in six weeks.
You've moved. Yes, we have.
Hello, Kevin.
You've got a little,
new, subterranean office.
Based on the number of men you've
got on and had on site for a while,
I'd say you've got
eight to ten weeks' work to get
upstairs ready for them.
We have a programme where there are
more guys due to come in, especially
once the windows go in, to fill the
plasterboard, doors, skirting...
There is nothing holding Deborah
back. She's determined to move in.
We've had a number of discussions
with the clients. I bet you have.
So, they are putting pressure on us.
Is the money also a pressure?
It always has been. I think
I find most projects,
if not every single one, has,
over the past years, been
on the lower side,
lower profit margins. Yeah.
Crikey!
There's such a lot to do here,
isn't there?
But never underestimate the value
of a deadline, because Jonathan
and Deborah,
they've waited ten years for this
and they're determined to
move in in six weeks' time.
And as far as she's concerned,
nothing,
but nothing,
will stand in their way.
But, less than two weeks later,
there does come some devastating
and unexpected news that brings the
whole project grinding to a halt.
We unfortunately found out
a couple of days ago that...
..the contractor had
gone into administration.
I kind of had a suspicion that,
you know, things might not be great.
I didn't think that they were
as serious as they obviously were.
I came down to find his guys
getting their tools and that's
when he said that the company had
been put into administration
and everything was kind of stopped.
It's just a bad situation,
it's not a good situation.
No-one is going to come
out of it the better.
Moving in looks further
away than ever.
Their already cramped studio is now
filled with bathroom suites,
retrieved from the abandoned site.
I now feel like BLEEP the house.
It's such a nightmare,
it's such a mess.
It's put us in...
It's put everything in jeopardy.
I don't now see the house...
I know it's right at the
last point, but I think nothing can
happen this year.
It's a real misfortune
for everybody involved.
It really is for us and
for Grazian.
Grazian's family business was
set up over 20 years ago.
The harsh economic climate has put
increased strain on a number
of their projects, making it
difficult for them to survive.
Our profit margins were either
non-existent or very minimal,
which we depended on a very
good cash flow.
Our whole family's pretty
much in tears.
We knew the project was
a very big challenge,
but we like that and
we took that on.
We were very eager to
get stuck in.
But in today's market,
there's no room for error
and many contractors are paying a
heavy penalty for fixed-price deals.
Jonathan, my heart goes out to him
and his family with how the
property's been left -
I am lost for words.
I don't know what to say.
It's the worst that can happen.
It's now four months since Jonathan
and Deborah's contractor went bust.
I'm keen to see how
they're bearing up.
Difficult kind of... And a rather
stressful experience.
Yeah, it was... It's been a... It's
been a tough sort of four months.
It just stopped. And it wasn't
watertight, it wasn't anything,
and no-one was doing anything, and
there wasn't anybody to do anything.
I think Jonathan has gone through
stages of saying,
when he's come home
at three in the morning,
because he's been mopping up
the water and bucketing it out,
that, literally,
"This house, we're out."
"We're going to complete it
and we're going to go."
Now, things are starting to happen.
I think that there's a level
of excitement starting again.
Building companies are usually
reluctant take on half-finished
projects,
but after months of searching,
they found Henry,
a contractor willing to step in.
I'm looking down the length
of this kitchen
at loads of hanging cables
and ducting and pipe work...
It's not that straightforward,
is it?
There are still things where I'm not
sure what those cables are doing.
Really?
With a new contractor in place
the projects can -
in fits and starts -
begin to get going again.
But it takes another six months
of hard slog
to get it close to
the finish line.
Despite what it looks like,
it's nearly done, actually.
It feels we've reached a milestone,
getting it here, getting it in.
I think we're probably about a week
away from moving into the top
two floors,
so it's all, kind of,
coming together.
And it'll be nice to have a home.
Almost three years after I first
met Jonathan and Deborah,
it's time to see if all their years
of longing, waiting,
planning and building
have yielded anything worthwhile.
This is something
of a transformation.
What was once a rubbish dump
is now a hidden gem.
How are you? Good! How are you?
I'm very well, yeah, yeah.
Very pleased to meet here.
Hello. How are you?
Good, good, good.
You're both well? We are.
We are.
Are you enjoying this place? Mm.
It's quite a reveal.
It's like a little magic world
of modernism
stuck behind these 19th-century
terraces.
It doesn't feel like you're bang
in the middle of central London.
No, no. It's more like bang in
the middle of Barcelona, really.
It does feel a bit like that.
It's more glamorous than that!
There's a lot of material,
and a lot of building here.
But you wouldn't know it.
The basement is now capped,
while the two above-ground storeys
are deliberately modest in size.
They avert their gaze
from the surrounding buildings
and focus instead on the slightly
sunken garden below.
This is not architecture
as object statement,
but as a building which is all
the time responding to the site.
I think the space has been very
well designed. It has.
It took a lot to achieve
the simplicity.
What do people say?
What do the neighbours say?
Everybody seems to be
rather intrigued.
I've spoken to a few people
and I think they appreciate it.
The balance, I think, between
our privacy and their privacy,
and overlooking, has fortunately
been achieved quite well.
Well, you say that...
All those windows look in to your...
But they're mainly staircase windows
or bathrooms. Really? Yes. Yes.
There's a bedroom, maybe, at the top,
but then, it's night-time. Ah, OK.
The tree-house has gone.
Much to the disappointment
of my girls.
And anyway, I'd sooner
trade that for this any day.
Show me around.
On this small site
there are some big ideas.
And no little ingenuity.
I like this very, very simple
threshold.
There's something going on here
which is nice.
That curtain wall of glass...
which is stepped off by a metre
from the...
This is what's doing all the work.
This beautiful polished concrete
column.
And that row of columns allows you
to then float the glass wall,
almost ambiguously, doesn't it?
Mm.
These columns - the posh word
for them is piloti -
hold the building up,
allowing one of architectures
greatest tricks -
the suggestion of effortless
weightlessness.
The kitchen is part
of the architecture, isn't it?
It's not just where you cook.
It looks like a big block of wall.
The whole thing was to have these
monolithic blocks,
like the extractor, the fireplace,
the toilet behind... The wall.
And the wall at the back which makes
effectively a room beyond.
Unlike the old apartment,
their new home has...
well, rooms. And separate spaces.
The fact that I can wake up at
five o'clock in the morning
and I can go downstairs and make
a cup of tea or do something
and not wake up the whole house
is...extraordinary!
We should go and explore.
Which way first? Upstairs?
Oh, it's very light this end of
the building, isn't it?
It's because of all that glass.
Glass ceiling, window...
This is all frosted. For privacy,
of course. Yup.
Meanwhile...
Oh... This is great, isn't it?
More light.
All the way down the corridor.
This simple seven-metre-long
skylight cleverly suggests
that the building steps off
the party wall behind it.
And it fights any idea of
claustrophobia
with a view to infinity.
So this is...
Mabel Lily's room.
Mabel Lily's room.
And it's connected to...
Harriet's room.
They've both got...
Very bright skylights, yes.
Which helps illuminate them. Helps
them wake up early, as well.
And the connecting door's
a big thing, isn't it?
It could be one bedroom, one space.
Door slamming going on
at the moment. Do they really?
"It's my room! Get out!"
And the fact that the rooms
mirror each other
has always been a nice thing.
So there's no excuse to argue.
Who's got the biggest room? Yeah.
Who's got prettiest chandelier?
Yes. I have. No, I have. No, I have.
And this, I have to say,
is I think brilliant. Yup.
A little stroke of genius
on the part of your architect.
That's what you pay them for, eh?
Ideas like this.
Receded, snuck into the room,
so you get privacy for the girls,
which is obviously needed,
but I particularly like the way
in which...
when they've slammed the door,
for the last time, and locked it,
they can still gesticulate through
the windows at each other,
can't they?
The three upstairs bedrooms
aren't over-large, or extravagant.
Neither are the luxurious bathrooms,
each of which are tucked away.
Oh, and they are Jonathan's
moving-in slippers.
Moving-in slippers, Jonathan?
A present to yourself.
In the master en suite bedroom,
there's an intriguing view from
their unfinished balcony
of the light well
in their sunken garden.
There's a sense of mystery about
that.
You don't expect to see
that in the garden, do you?
You don't really know what's down
there. No, no, no.
Well, I don't. Show me.
The biggest magic trick here is,
of course,
the contrast between modest
overground spaces,
and the giant basement,
lit partly by the expansive
stairwell.
You've got a slate wall to your spa.
Like the very best Swiss resorts.
That's very...ultra-fashionable.
Lovely.
For me, it's the best space,
because of the sheer height.
The National Portrait Gallery
has got one of these.
This is the third light well,
isn't it?
So you can swim under natural light.
That was the idea, so that you'd
see the sun shining, rippling
on the water. Nice.
I love this. This is surreal!
Heat, heat!
The blast of heat and humidity
coming in here.
That is exceptionally warm.
I remember when we stood,
sort of through there somewhere,
surrounded by those concrete piles,
well below this floor level.
We were another...
Exactly. We're a storey down now,
but to excavate the pool it had
to go down and another storey.
And this is the result,
which is discombobulating.
It is quite hard to actually
remind myself
that we're below ground.
Discovering a pool buried in this
basement is surprising,
as is the sauna, and the gym.
I wonder how this indulgent
adult playground
sits alongside Jonathan's
eco-credentials.
You've used hundreds of tonnes
of concrete
in wrangling this place.
Did you... Do you... Can you...
Where does the balance lie?
We don't have any other heating
in the house.
There's other things that save in
that aspect.
That's a very important point.
The pool is your only source
of heating. Absolutely.
This underground labyrinth
is crammed with rooms.
Around the front light well
courtyard
are Deborah's and Jonathan's
own swanky new studies,
next to which is a self-contained
nanny flat,
with kitchen and bathroom.
This building is a mathematical
exercise
in maximising every square inch of
possible space out of a plot -
necessary in central London.
But that will never be
straightforward.
A building like this requires
a huge amount of drive.
And that comes from you.
It doesn't come from the architect,
the contractor.
I want to know where that
comes from.
Whilst we were packing to
move in here,
we came across a video that
Jonathan had made about building
a skateboarding park, and on the
video, he makes a comment.
Never give up.
And he says
that as a 13-year-old boy.
If you put enough effort
into anything, you will achieve.
In pushing to the very edges,
into other people's gardens,
does that not just, in retrospect,
too much?
I feel duty bound to make the most of
whatever I try and do
and I wouldn't... It wouldn't have
been right to not maximise it.
Interesting, interesting. That would
have been to compromise. Yes.
And that's not within you, is it?
No, I don't think you should.
What are the little details of the
building that bring you some joy?
It's just discovering corners,
discovering shards of light
coming in.
The sound of the children
playing in their own rooms, which is
quite lovely to hear them upstairs
really enjoying their space.
They all deserve to enjoy this
building, but at what price?
Inevitably,
given the history of the project,
it's gone well over
the original 650,000 budget.
How much did it cost?
I think it's probably close to 900.
Are you in penury now
or are you in a good place?
I would've liked to have spent less,
but you always would.
I mean, all in all, what with three
years in the planning, execution and
ten years of devising and dreaming,
was that worth it in the end?
Yes, it's amazing.
We have an amazing place that we love
and we're incredibly grateful for.
In relation to what has been
put into this,
to every single corner of this
house,
I think that Jonathan has...
I think his children should be very
proud of what he's done.
You might find this place
wilful, forced, overwrought.
You might baulk at the amounts
of materials and energy that have
gone into making it, but
buildings don't just happen.
They have to be willed,
forced and wrangled into existence,
and, as to the embodied energy,
that's incalculable, really,
and, in this case,
its costs are incalculable,
because the greatest amount of
energy in a building like this,
is human energy.
At times, it even seems superhuman.
I usually find that the greater
the will, the greater the building.
It's kind of a mother ship. The
kitchen is the heart of the home.
My natural instinct is to design
rhythmic spaces.
The design part was tricky.
We fought a lot.
We don't have the money.
We still don't even have the security
that we're going to get the money.
He now has to work harder
or make some changes.
So close to it being something.
No, it's a fantasy
until it's finished, Martin.
- London, for example -
then you'll be familiar with
the problem of lack of space.
People traditionally, of course,
have solved this by going up.
There's a two-storey extension
just there.
But supposing you did the opposite.
Supposing instead of going up
you went down,
and you put half of your house
underground.
Jonathan Broome and his wife
Deborah Sheridan-Taylor,
have been scouring London for a
building plot for almost a decade.
If ever we saw any developments
going on,
we'd stop and peek in
and always fantasise about -
"Wow, they found...
How do you find that plot of land?"
Jonathan runs an eco-taxi company,
but his real obsession has always
been to build his own home.
I think I can honestly say that
probably every day
for the last 10 years
I have sat and thought about this.
While they've been looking, actress
Deborah has become a full-time mum
in their one-room apartment.
We only moved in here literally
to be here for six months,
and we've outgrown this space,
I think.
We got married and had a baby
and then another baby...
and we're still here.
And that's it. We've literally...
Life has happened while we have been
waiting for life to happen.
Jonathan is so determined to build
his own place,
he spent years compiling a detailed
scrapbook
of his ideal nonexistent home.
I think I horrified the architect
when it landed on his desk.
The house that we're trying to build
is really like a list of dreams.
Until that list of dreams
becomes a reality...
Come on, girls, let's go corridor!
..the children have to make do with
the corridor they use as a garden.
Under the bridge,
quick, quick, quick! Come on.
The opportunity to be able
to open a door, and go outside...
It is going to be wonderful!
After 10 years of searching,
however,
they have finally found
a tiny plot in north London.
So you enter your site through a
gate underneath somebody's bedroom?
Yeah. Yes.
It's quite narrow, isn't it?
Jonathan and Deborah paid
£405,000 for a plot
of less than a 10th of an acre.
Welcome to our rubbish dump.
LAUGHTER
Full of buddleia.
How do you feel now, as owners
of this very beautiful triangle?
It's on the cusp of making
a long-time-dream real.
So what's down here? Have you
ever been to the back of the site?
We've actually never been right to
the end of the site. Oh, come on!
No. Please, you be the first.
Be careful, though.
Gosh, an old shoe. I'm sure
we'll find a body in here!
I'm not joking.
It goes down to a very narrow point
at the end.
It is, isn't it? Really narrow!
It's a very, very sharp
pointy triangle.
Yup. Here we are -
I've got my machete.
Such is the scarcity
and the price of land in London,
they'll be using every inch of the
small awkward wedge-shaped site.
And what they want to do is squeeze
in an ambitious 3-storey home.
First, they'll need to demolish
a staggering 14 neighbours' walls
to excavate the whole plot up
to the boundary.
A huge retaining wall around
the perimeter
will then encase and anchor the
6m deep basement into the ground.
This floor will be crammed with
a labyrinth of rooms -
two studies opening onto a
courtyard,
a self-contained nanny flat,
a gym,
and the greatest indulgence -
a subterranean, 12m lap pool.
A guest bedroom will open onto
a second courtyard.
The two courtyards, along with
a glass-roofed internal staircase,
will suck some much-needed light
into the basement.
Above ground,
the party walls get rebuilt
and against one of them,
Jonathan and Deborah will construct
the houses middle floor,
slightly sunken down and glazed
along one entire length
to pull more light in.
Inside, a small playroom will sit
alongside a comfortable kitchen
and living room.
Meanwhile, the third storey,
pops its head above the parapet.
It'll contain three bedrooms
and two bathrooms,
with views and a balcony
overlooking their small garden.
The need to respect everybody's
privacy,
including the neighbours',
means inward-facing windows
and skylights.
And a low profile for the building.
Which is mainly buried,
like half-submerged submarine.
So where are we standing,
for example, here?
We are literally on the corner
of the ground and first floor.
But below us something is going on,
isn't there?
The whole plot is excavated
for the basement.
The whole plot?! The whole plot.
Not just the bit underneath
this building? No.
50% of the building itself
is in the basement.
If on the ground floor you've got
your kitchen, sitting room, etc,
and on the first floor,
your bedrooms,
what happens in the basement?
We are installing a small gym,
a study, and a nice swimming pool.
Like an adult playground.
We just wanted to fill the space
with everything we've ever wanted.
And what's inspired it? Well,
I lived in Los Angeles for quite a
long time,
and I always adores those beautiful
houses.
And I always loved the light
in those sort of houses.
We love light. Light is the most
vital and important part
of the whole build.
So you build underground, yeah(!)
No, but with amazing sources.
That's been a main point -
that we have as much opportunity
to bring light into the house.
Because in Los Angeles there is
a lot more light than in London.
Jonathan's going to take out a loan
to help cover the £650,000 budget.
But I'm wondering if that's enough,
given the horrible logistics of this
site.
We are literally building...
The whole plot is being excavated,
so right up to the wall.
So this comes down.
And so it's IN their garden?
This is why we're taking down
every wall.
Essentially, we're going to have
to do is underpin every single wall
here.
You're expecting to go
into everybody's garden,
to be able to build your house?
By how far?
I think it's going to be
approximately a metre.
But, if I lived there, I'd have to
sacrifice a very lovely palm tree.
But, obviously,
we have to put it back.
Or a garden shed, or something.
What everyone has.
We're hoping to be part
of a community here.
We're not developing it and selling
it on to somebody else,
and who cares what anyone feels.
We both desperately care about...
Massively. It's massively important.
We don't want to be
the...hated neighbours.
There are 17 separate party wall
agreements.
Land grabbing,
no matter how temporary,
is not the ideal way to begin
community relations.
Now, this plot is in Camden.
And I cannot stress to you
enough just how difficult it is
to find a plot so close
to the centre of London.
It does, of course,
come with its stings in the tail.
For example, they're having to
really push everything they're doing
to the very edges of the boundary
of the site.
And even beyond.
They're trying to excavate into
their neighbours' gardens.
And they have 17 party wall
agreements to negotiate
in order to be able to do that.
That is the land they bought...
this is in land they are
negotiating on.
And this here... What's this?
Oh, this is the red mist
descending on numbers 23 and 25...
Oh, and 37.
Ouch.
Not surprisingly, six months later
they're still negotiating.
But some progress has been made.
The Roper family, for example,
have already signed up.
Were you surprised at being asked
to give over
a metre of your own garden? Yes.
I, personally, was.
I thought, "Oh, my God, you know.
"Got to give a metre over of our
garden, you know.
"We're going to be...squashed."
But, end of the day,
it'll all go back.
You know, its disruption,
but as long as it does go back,
then it's not that big a deal.
We are OK with it for the moment.
It takes 10 months of careful
negotiation for all 17 neighbours
to finally agree terms.
10 months of waiting for work
finally begin.
Literally, every week
I have genuinely believed
we were going to start.
It's been very, very tough.
Today they can start to delicately
unpick all their neighbours' walls.
Firstly, we need to clear it,
which we are doing today.
Then we're going to get into each
garden, take the wall down...
With it, I think
it looks a little smaller.
Their contractor Grazian
will be managing the site,
but even for a seasoned builder
like him
this is no straightforward project.
Party walls... We're used to having
two, maybe three.
But having 17
is above the norm, for us.
Jonathan's taken it upon himself to
be the community liaison officer,
dispensing charm and tact
to all around.
Is for anything else we can do?
Do you want anything else to go?
Whenever I come down I try
and knock on a few people doors.
Please, give me a call
if you need anything.
I just want it to proceed
as well is it can.
With as little disruption to
everybody as possible.
Is she OK? Yeah. Very nice.
Negotiating all the party walls has
needed to be resourced with time
and with thousands of pounds.
There's no doubt this is
a costly and complicated building.
Paul Archer as the architect
for the design.
It just strikes me as a particularly
ambitious project.
Is it a 650,000...
It strikes me as more.
I reckon you could double
what he's got to spend.
He could get to 1.2 million easily.
Basically, I think we
trying to do a building
which is £1 million, but for less.
We will spend his budget,
and then we will stop.
Every last penny.
The question is how far we get.
My concern is that he gets as far
as ground level,
and the contingencies and problems
that he discovers in the ground,
swallow this budget.
And if there is no more money
this half doesn't get built. Yep.
That's a definite possibility.
Can they take occupation?
Can they live in this underground?
You probably could do if you had to,
yes.
But I don't think they'll want to.
You know there is an inescapable
truth about this project.
There's Jonathan wanting to spend
£650,000,
there's the architect saying
it's going to cost a million,
I think they could easily spend 1.2.
And if it goes over budget...
what happens?
They never get out of the ground.
Who wants to live in a submarine?
Who wants to live in a house
where you can never...
you can never surface for air?
Jonathan and Deborah have started to
build their London home
with the highest hopes of meeting
their ?650,000 budget.
They've agreed a fixed-price
contract with Grazian
for the first phase,
the basement.
But by my reckoning, Jonathan, who
admittedly is a canny businessman,
still doesn't have enough
money to finish the house.
A month in and all the
neighbours' garden walls have been
taken down and replaced with
a temporary hoarding.
Hello, you two.
Long time no see, eh?
How are you doing? Very well,
how are you? Mmmwah!
It's a year, you know that?
Yeah, just under a year.
Well, getting on for.
And you built a tree house.
We have a wonderful tree house, yes.
The entire plot will be excavated,
so they've had to fit their site
office in a neighbour's tree.
Our children think this is
the house we are building.
HE LAUGHS
They think we've done it.
"That was quick!"
It's perfect, it's in a tree too.
With a lovely view of your rubble
yard. Yeah. And how has it been?
In relation to the neighbours?
Yeah.
Well, everyone has pretty much
been very supportive.
We've obviously tried to
be as accommodating as we can.
And the budget?
Is it as tight as it ever was?
I think it's probably going to come
in at a little bit more than...
we thought. Which means?
For a change! What a surprise.
I don't know yet.
It's gone up
because I didn't appreciate quite how
expensive it is to dig such a big
hole and fill it with concrete.
Nothing on this
project is going to be cheap.
The groundworks and basement alone
cost almost 400,000.
But no excavation can take place
until a series
of concrete piles are drilled
around the perimeter of the whole
site,
forming a retaining exterior wall to
hold up the neighbours' gardens.
Hello, Grazian. Hello, Kevin.
This well is biblical!
How are they getting on with the
piling? On average, ten piles a day.
How many do you need to do
altogether? 180 all in.
You might hope it would ease
off a bit before you start pouring
the concrete. It's a
very wet slurry mix, isn't it?
It's meant to be.
It's designed that way.
Good, cos it's getting wetter in
this weather. Shouldn't be
a problem at all.
Two months later
and the piling is complete,
but there is a significant problem.
It was unclear in their planning
permission as to where
they should determine ground level.
As a result, there is
a risk they might not be
digging down far enough.
The house could exceed its height
restrictions
so Grazian has to dig down further
and adopt an entirely new strategy.
The issue we have with going that
extra half a metre,
that takes us
over the safe limit of excavation,
which means we have to prop
the 17 gardens we have,
we have to install propping,
shoring, something to hold
the earth back so that the gardens
do not fall in on us.
This is bad news for Grazian.
It will cost him
dear in terms of time and materials
and cut into his fixed margin.
I would never have chosen
to do this method.
If we knew from the start
exactly where we were,
what we had to do...which has now
caused the need for a makeshift,
as-you-go-along builder platform,
which I'm very unhappy with.
The lack of clarity in a previous
planning concept has led to
this big headache for everyone,
not least for the architect, Paul.
The issue which has meant they are
now going down another 700mm
in height, to get a new lower level,
how did that happen? You saw the
site when you first came here.
It was quite difficult to get an
accurate survey on what was
already here.
And very difficult to get
the actual heights of all
the individual gardens because
we couldn't get access to them.
So who picks up the cost,
then, of going to the extra 700mm?
Well, it's a mixture of factors.
But certainly the client will end up
catching some of it.
So Jonathan is having to pay for it,
is he?
I'm sure he's not happy about it,
but that's what a contingency sum
is about.
He's a very good negotiator.
Jonathan is desperate to save money
and so he's started to take
more time out from his eco-taxi
company to get more hands-on.
Where I think my skills lie
is just constantly
working on the budget, trying
to stretch it that bit more,
trying to figure out what savings
we can make.
Where should the money be spent?
And try to negotiate a better price.
That is in essence what I do and what
I spend most of the time doing.
At five, I had a stall outside
my house selling orange juice.
It's just something I seemed to be
quite successful at.
Jonathan is putting more and more
of his time into the project.
Deborah can't quite match that.
Why do we always have to
talk about the house, the house,
and what's going to happen?
It's like...
you know, it's
kind of like the love of his life.
When I can see a shape, that will
be when my love affair...
will begin, I think.
However, Deborah is fully employed
as joint community liaison officer.
We spent the whole weekend
making banana bread,
and sent Jonathan and the girls went
and delivered them.
Didn't you, Macky? Did you go and
give cakies to our new neighbours?
Yes.
Not everyone was there last time
we made the banana bread, so
I decided to make a few more to say
once again "We're so appreciative."
Today the neighbours'
walls are being rebuilt
and the hoardings are coming down.
Deborah
and Jonathan can return the land
they borrowed over five months ago.
Their extensive charm campaign
seems to have worked.
We've had hardly any,
if any complaints,
and it just seems as
if we had no neighbours around us.
It's now six months
since they started
and excavation of the gargantuan
basement has no end, it seems.
By going deeper, we've doubled
the time to get things in and out.
It just gets harder
and more labour-intensive.
This hole is a monstrous size.
It's not a house, it's a
civil engineering project.
How often do you make it onto site?
Three or four times a week.
Because it is rocketing on now,
isn't it?
I have to check that it still here.
Check the hole's still here.
My God, that is a hole!
Cavernous, isn't it?
It's like being inside the prow
of great concrete ship.
I don't think I've ever visited
a house as sunken as this,
one which is so buried. And what
will we be in when the house is
finished?
I think was standing in...in a
spare bedroom. Good. At the moment.
It's often said that
when constructing,
you never quite know how much money
you are going to spend
until you're out of the ground.
And of course here,
you never will be!
You were thinking of spending
altogether something like 650
to begin with.
Yeah, it was that kind of price
without any contingencies
in it in an ideal world.
It's something approaching
maybe 850 maybe, to...
Yeah, that's probably... If you want
to kit it out the way you want to.
Yeah, which we are going to try
to do.
If we can borrow money and
we can get
it together to finish it now, we're
going to do our utmost to do that.
You get the risk, though,
that you end up with a basement
you don't use or a building
which is half finished, yeah?
Well, two-thirds finished,
hopefully.
Finished and you just owe
a great load of money.
Finished
and we owe a lot of money, yeah.
But it's a calculated risk
and I don't think I'm reckless...
No, in the current climate
I salute you for it.
After a whole seven
months of digging,
the excavation of the six-metre
basement is complete.
Finally they can start to build
their underground home.
It feels like a major day today,
doesn't it? Yeah.
It's moving out of phase
digging, digging digging.
Don't you think there's
an energy here today?
We are finally actually putting
in the first bit of the house.
Quite excited about today.
I just discovered from Grazian that
they have four hours in which to
play around before it sets.
It then takes four years
to fully set.
To dry. To fully set? Four years?
Who knew?
A month later,
Jonathan makes a radical decision.
He's calculated that getting
a loan to include
his 200,000 shortfall
will cost too much.
Instead, he's decided
on an alternative way to finance
the project.
I sold my company. I think my heart
went from it a bit and sort of...
I fell in love with this. My wife
would say that I am a big risk taker.
She would probably say that
I'm the biggest...
Well, she has said that I take more
risks than anyone that she knows.
But in my blissful ignorance it never
has crossed my mind
that I couldn't not finish it.
Good girl, well done.
At this precise moment, Deborah
doesn't share Jonathan's optimism.
Jonathan not working...and putting
everything into this house,
it's suddenly become a little bit
sort of more scary.
I've always trusted him.
You know, I hope he's not
sort of overstretched itself.
Do you want to come through
the little hole?
Sometimes we have massive fights
and we say, "Is it worth it?
"Is it worth it?
What is it all for?"
We're going crazy trying to do
this and have we taken on too much?
I suppose it's all coming together.
We haven't built a house yet, so...
..who knows?
Jonathan and Deborah are eight
months into the construction
of their half-buried
house in North London.
This gigantic, double-skinned
basement is being
wrapped in a waterproof membrane
and is being packed with
so much insulation, there'll be no
need for conventional heating.
We're over the moon now we're
starting to put everything
back in - we're actually building
something now.
The next stage will be to pour
the internal skin of the basement
walls, which need reinforcing with
vast amounts of steel.
The key with these walls is
the preparation. We need to get
this absolutely spot-on -
it needs to be incredibly solid.
The minute something cracks, doesn't
hold, we've got a major problem,
so we can't afford
for that to happen.
Next up
comes a complex wooden mould,
strong enough to hold something
like 200 tonnes of wet concrete.
It's incredible,
the kind of symmetry of it all and
it's like a kind of maze
going in there.
After weeks of painstaking
preparation, today
the walls will be poured.
It's of course vital that the wooden
mould doesn't fracture under
the weight of the concrete.
Any failure could be calamitous,
dangerous and expensive for Grazian.
My margins are incredibly
tight in terms of time frame -
everything has been worked out quite
efficiently and to keep the
price down, in order to win
us the work,
so we don't have much
room for error.
But it isn't long before there's
a problem.
CREAKING
Stop! Stop, stop, stop.
HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
There were some sort of creaks
and crunchy sounds,
so they've stopped
everything straightaway.
That's a tremendous amount
of pressure, so we're trying to
figure out exactly where that is
and what, if there is an issue.
What's come up? Just the...
The whole wall.
The whole timber wall has gone up.
So much pressure has actually moved
the shuttering up.
If this timber shuttering breaks,
there'll be an avalanche
of concrete.
We've used thousands
and thousands of screws.
Unfortunately, it looks like we're
missing one screw somewhere.
Now it's level.
HE SPEAKS OWN LANGUAGE
Fortunately, Grazian's team have
spotted the fracture in time,
which they need to contain and
reinforce with more
screws and fixings.
With luck, the basement will,
within hours, have walls.
Two weeks later, they're ready to
pour the ground floor slab,
forming a lid on top
of the basement.
The lower ground floor has already
swallowed up nearly two thirds
of their original budget, and they
still have two more floors to build.
It's a little
bit like standing at ground level
when you first bought the site,
isn't it? It is, it is.
All those months of work to get back
to where you were, almost. Yup.
And the money situation just changed
entirely, hasn't it?
Did you add enough from selling
the business?
I don't really know,
is the honest answer.
It's not going to be
completely outright.
We should be able to get cheaper
finance at the end of it,
if there is a shortfall of an extra
50 or 100 or 200 or whatever it is.
It should be OK.
Are you, kind of,
excited by the idea of
Jonathan selling his share or
is it sort of worrying?
Worrying when you don't have
anyone in the family working.
That can be slightly worrying.
He does sit at home a lot going...
Adding things up in his head.
His parents are petrified -
they have stopped asking questions.
I think, eventually, they'll just
come here and hopefully see a house
at the end of it.
But his father just shudders.
Jonathan is prepared to risk a
great deal to build this house.
After all, this has been
an obsession for the last ten years.
Let's hope both the money
and the design of this
half-underground home work out.
Right now, I think it's very hard
to figure this out.
At the moment, it just feels
troglodytic. It's exciting.
It's all in here,
isn't it, Jonathan?
In your imagination, you can see
it all. Every detail. I guess so.
Well, I've been poring over plans
and things for years. And?
I... It's not in here yet.
I am still sort of slightly...
It's a cold,
damp basement with no light.
You've yet to fall in love with it.
I'm yet to fall in love with
this bit, yeah.
Jonathan is now working
full-time on the project in an
effort to cut costs.
No, not that I know of.
I'm spending most of my time trying
to get the best price that I can.
That's right.
I push things as hard as I can
without it breaking.
Now, Jonathan is at home all day,
both business
and family life have
to take place in this one room.
It's very hard with the children
here and me here
and phones ringing and
stuff like that.
Daddy always on the phone?
Yeah.
So, it's not the
greatest environment.
But after 11 months,
their new home seems to be
finally coming up for air.
The structure for the next two
storeys is up.
Well, what a change, eh? Look,
platform. Floor, solid. And this!
Now the excitement is mounting,
because I can actually
visualise that that is going to
be our balcony from our bedroom.
That's going to be our playroom
and this is our garden that we're
standing in.
You don't feel too hemmed in?
No, I like that feeling,
I feel quite secure.
My biggest fear was that it was like
a, sort of, fishbowl and we'll be
peered in on all the time, but I'm
actually really comfortable now.
If you put a recliner here,
your head would be actually...
Do know what? I can't
see a single window.
You couldn't be seen.
Well, this is why we did it,
you know, for Jonathan,
with his whole nudist thing.
It's perfect.
He only ever sunbathes totally nude.
Congratulations, Jonathan. You'll be
able to get all over, even tan.
DEBORAH LAUGHS
And with the end seemingly in sight,
Jonathan's negotiated
a deal on some hi-tech bathrooms.
If I show you this
particular toilet, sir...
It is a little bit
different from a normal toilet seat.
You will notice,
when you sit down, it's warm.
So rather than being heated, because
someone has sat there before you...
That's so lovely.
It's heated to your own
temperature, so especially...
Oh, it's so warm.
If I press this button here,
that says "Rear".
There is a wand unit that pops out
and washes you. Hello.
Despite the budget overruns, they
are determined not to compromise.
We've got one chance to do it,
so, to do it right,
to do the house justice,
I have to absolutely maximise what
I can do and what I can get.
After 15 months of
relentless building,
the structure of this house
is complete.
But there are still no windows
and, until they are installed,
they can't get on to
the final finishes.
Look, there's water pouring into
all of your drains.
When are you going to move in? We
have a date of the 15th of November.
That's six weeks away. Yeah.
You've got no windows.
But what we're thinking...
But, Kevin, we are thinking we'll
move in...
Hopefully, if the glass comes in,
we'll have this floor and upstairs.
But there's so much to do.
Everything is in place. We just have
to now basically put up the walls.
No, Deborah, everything is
not in place. It's not?
Everything's very much not in place.
There is no plasterboard in place.
But how long does it take to
plasterboard?
That doesn't take long.
Probably a week for that
and then you've got second fits,
you've got all the furniture to put
in, got the glazing to put in.
We want to get in here.
What drives you to try and get
in here sooner rather than later?
If you don't push, then...
So, it's about driving the project?
I think so, yeah.
Set deadlines for the builders. Yes.
And enough, already. We're
talking about the house. Enough!
We want to move in and start living.
This is a tall order for Grazian.
There's no way this building
will be habitable in six weeks.
You've moved. Yes, we have.
Hello, Kevin.
You've got a little,
new, subterranean office.
Based on the number of men you've
got on and had on site for a while,
I'd say you've got
eight to ten weeks' work to get
upstairs ready for them.
We have a programme where there are
more guys due to come in, especially
once the windows go in, to fill the
plasterboard, doors, skirting...
There is nothing holding Deborah
back. She's determined to move in.
We've had a number of discussions
with the clients. I bet you have.
So, they are putting pressure on us.
Is the money also a pressure?
It always has been. I think
I find most projects,
if not every single one, has,
over the past years, been
on the lower side,
lower profit margins. Yeah.
Crikey!
There's such a lot to do here,
isn't there?
But never underestimate the value
of a deadline, because Jonathan
and Deborah,
they've waited ten years for this
and they're determined to
move in in six weeks' time.
And as far as she's concerned,
nothing,
but nothing,
will stand in their way.
But, less than two weeks later,
there does come some devastating
and unexpected news that brings the
whole project grinding to a halt.
We unfortunately found out
a couple of days ago that...
..the contractor had
gone into administration.
I kind of had a suspicion that,
you know, things might not be great.
I didn't think that they were
as serious as they obviously were.
I came down to find his guys
getting their tools and that's
when he said that the company had
been put into administration
and everything was kind of stopped.
It's just a bad situation,
it's not a good situation.
No-one is going to come
out of it the better.
Moving in looks further
away than ever.
Their already cramped studio is now
filled with bathroom suites,
retrieved from the abandoned site.
I now feel like BLEEP the house.
It's such a nightmare,
it's such a mess.
It's put us in...
It's put everything in jeopardy.
I don't now see the house...
I know it's right at the
last point, but I think nothing can
happen this year.
It's a real misfortune
for everybody involved.
It really is for us and
for Grazian.
Grazian's family business was
set up over 20 years ago.
The harsh economic climate has put
increased strain on a number
of their projects, making it
difficult for them to survive.
Our profit margins were either
non-existent or very minimal,
which we depended on a very
good cash flow.
Our whole family's pretty
much in tears.
We knew the project was
a very big challenge,
but we like that and
we took that on.
We were very eager to
get stuck in.
But in today's market,
there's no room for error
and many contractors are paying a
heavy penalty for fixed-price deals.
Jonathan, my heart goes out to him
and his family with how the
property's been left -
I am lost for words.
I don't know what to say.
It's the worst that can happen.
It's now four months since Jonathan
and Deborah's contractor went bust.
I'm keen to see how
they're bearing up.
Difficult kind of... And a rather
stressful experience.
Yeah, it was... It's been a... It's
been a tough sort of four months.
It just stopped. And it wasn't
watertight, it wasn't anything,
and no-one was doing anything, and
there wasn't anybody to do anything.
I think Jonathan has gone through
stages of saying,
when he's come home
at three in the morning,
because he's been mopping up
the water and bucketing it out,
that, literally,
"This house, we're out."
"We're going to complete it
and we're going to go."
Now, things are starting to happen.
I think that there's a level
of excitement starting again.
Building companies are usually
reluctant take on half-finished
projects,
but after months of searching,
they found Henry,
a contractor willing to step in.
I'm looking down the length
of this kitchen
at loads of hanging cables
and ducting and pipe work...
It's not that straightforward,
is it?
There are still things where I'm not
sure what those cables are doing.
Really?
With a new contractor in place
the projects can -
in fits and starts -
begin to get going again.
But it takes another six months
of hard slog
to get it close to
the finish line.
Despite what it looks like,
it's nearly done, actually.
It feels we've reached a milestone,
getting it here, getting it in.
I think we're probably about a week
away from moving into the top
two floors,
so it's all, kind of,
coming together.
And it'll be nice to have a home.
Almost three years after I first
met Jonathan and Deborah,
it's time to see if all their years
of longing, waiting,
planning and building
have yielded anything worthwhile.
This is something
of a transformation.
What was once a rubbish dump
is now a hidden gem.
How are you? Good! How are you?
I'm very well, yeah, yeah.
Very pleased to meet here.
Hello. How are you?
Good, good, good.
You're both well? We are.
We are.
Are you enjoying this place? Mm.
It's quite a reveal.
It's like a little magic world
of modernism
stuck behind these 19th-century
terraces.
It doesn't feel like you're bang
in the middle of central London.
No, no. It's more like bang in
the middle of Barcelona, really.
It does feel a bit like that.
It's more glamorous than that!
There's a lot of material,
and a lot of building here.
But you wouldn't know it.
The basement is now capped,
while the two above-ground storeys
are deliberately modest in size.
They avert their gaze
from the surrounding buildings
and focus instead on the slightly
sunken garden below.
This is not architecture
as object statement,
but as a building which is all
the time responding to the site.
I think the space has been very
well designed. It has.
It took a lot to achieve
the simplicity.
What do people say?
What do the neighbours say?
Everybody seems to be
rather intrigued.
I've spoken to a few people
and I think they appreciate it.
The balance, I think, between
our privacy and their privacy,
and overlooking, has fortunately
been achieved quite well.
Well, you say that...
All those windows look in to your...
But they're mainly staircase windows
or bathrooms. Really? Yes. Yes.
There's a bedroom, maybe, at the top,
but then, it's night-time. Ah, OK.
The tree-house has gone.
Much to the disappointment
of my girls.
And anyway, I'd sooner
trade that for this any day.
Show me around.
On this small site
there are some big ideas.
And no little ingenuity.
I like this very, very simple
threshold.
There's something going on here
which is nice.
That curtain wall of glass...
which is stepped off by a metre
from the...
This is what's doing all the work.
This beautiful polished concrete
column.
And that row of columns allows you
to then float the glass wall,
almost ambiguously, doesn't it?
Mm.
These columns - the posh word
for them is piloti -
hold the building up,
allowing one of architectures
greatest tricks -
the suggestion of effortless
weightlessness.
The kitchen is part
of the architecture, isn't it?
It's not just where you cook.
It looks like a big block of wall.
The whole thing was to have these
monolithic blocks,
like the extractor, the fireplace,
the toilet behind... The wall.
And the wall at the back which makes
effectively a room beyond.
Unlike the old apartment,
their new home has...
well, rooms. And separate spaces.
The fact that I can wake up at
five o'clock in the morning
and I can go downstairs and make
a cup of tea or do something
and not wake up the whole house
is...extraordinary!
We should go and explore.
Which way first? Upstairs?
Oh, it's very light this end of
the building, isn't it?
It's because of all that glass.
Glass ceiling, window...
This is all frosted. For privacy,
of course. Yup.
Meanwhile...
Oh... This is great, isn't it?
More light.
All the way down the corridor.
This simple seven-metre-long
skylight cleverly suggests
that the building steps off
the party wall behind it.
And it fights any idea of
claustrophobia
with a view to infinity.
So this is...
Mabel Lily's room.
Mabel Lily's room.
And it's connected to...
Harriet's room.
They've both got...
Very bright skylights, yes.
Which helps illuminate them. Helps
them wake up early, as well.
And the connecting door's
a big thing, isn't it?
It could be one bedroom, one space.
Door slamming going on
at the moment. Do they really?
"It's my room! Get out!"
And the fact that the rooms
mirror each other
has always been a nice thing.
So there's no excuse to argue.
Who's got the biggest room? Yeah.
Who's got prettiest chandelier?
Yes. I have. No, I have. No, I have.
And this, I have to say,
is I think brilliant. Yup.
A little stroke of genius
on the part of your architect.
That's what you pay them for, eh?
Ideas like this.
Receded, snuck into the room,
so you get privacy for the girls,
which is obviously needed,
but I particularly like the way
in which...
when they've slammed the door,
for the last time, and locked it,
they can still gesticulate through
the windows at each other,
can't they?
The three upstairs bedrooms
aren't over-large, or extravagant.
Neither are the luxurious bathrooms,
each of which are tucked away.
Oh, and they are Jonathan's
moving-in slippers.
Moving-in slippers, Jonathan?
A present to yourself.
In the master en suite bedroom,
there's an intriguing view from
their unfinished balcony
of the light well
in their sunken garden.
There's a sense of mystery about
that.
You don't expect to see
that in the garden, do you?
You don't really know what's down
there. No, no, no.
Well, I don't. Show me.
The biggest magic trick here is,
of course,
the contrast between modest
overground spaces,
and the giant basement,
lit partly by the expansive
stairwell.
You've got a slate wall to your spa.
Like the very best Swiss resorts.
That's very...ultra-fashionable.
Lovely.
For me, it's the best space,
because of the sheer height.
The National Portrait Gallery
has got one of these.
This is the third light well,
isn't it?
So you can swim under natural light.
That was the idea, so that you'd
see the sun shining, rippling
on the water. Nice.
I love this. This is surreal!
Heat, heat!
The blast of heat and humidity
coming in here.
That is exceptionally warm.
I remember when we stood,
sort of through there somewhere,
surrounded by those concrete piles,
well below this floor level.
We were another...
Exactly. We're a storey down now,
but to excavate the pool it had
to go down and another storey.
And this is the result,
which is discombobulating.
It is quite hard to actually
remind myself
that we're below ground.
Discovering a pool buried in this
basement is surprising,
as is the sauna, and the gym.
I wonder how this indulgent
adult playground
sits alongside Jonathan's
eco-credentials.
You've used hundreds of tonnes
of concrete
in wrangling this place.
Did you... Do you... Can you...
Where does the balance lie?
We don't have any other heating
in the house.
There's other things that save in
that aspect.
That's a very important point.
The pool is your only source
of heating. Absolutely.
This underground labyrinth
is crammed with rooms.
Around the front light well
courtyard
are Deborah's and Jonathan's
own swanky new studies,
next to which is a self-contained
nanny flat,
with kitchen and bathroom.
This building is a mathematical
exercise
in maximising every square inch of
possible space out of a plot -
necessary in central London.
But that will never be
straightforward.
A building like this requires
a huge amount of drive.
And that comes from you.
It doesn't come from the architect,
the contractor.
I want to know where that
comes from.
Whilst we were packing to
move in here,
we came across a video that
Jonathan had made about building
a skateboarding park, and on the
video, he makes a comment.
Never give up.
And he says
that as a 13-year-old boy.
If you put enough effort
into anything, you will achieve.
In pushing to the very edges,
into other people's gardens,
does that not just, in retrospect,
too much?
I feel duty bound to make the most of
whatever I try and do
and I wouldn't... It wouldn't have
been right to not maximise it.
Interesting, interesting. That would
have been to compromise. Yes.
And that's not within you, is it?
No, I don't think you should.
What are the little details of the
building that bring you some joy?
It's just discovering corners,
discovering shards of light
coming in.
The sound of the children
playing in their own rooms, which is
quite lovely to hear them upstairs
really enjoying their space.
They all deserve to enjoy this
building, but at what price?
Inevitably,
given the history of the project,
it's gone well over
the original 650,000 budget.
How much did it cost?
I think it's probably close to 900.
Are you in penury now
or are you in a good place?
I would've liked to have spent less,
but you always would.
I mean, all in all, what with three
years in the planning, execution and
ten years of devising and dreaming,
was that worth it in the end?
Yes, it's amazing.
We have an amazing place that we love
and we're incredibly grateful for.
In relation to what has been
put into this,
to every single corner of this
house,
I think that Jonathan has...
I think his children should be very
proud of what he's done.
You might find this place
wilful, forced, overwrought.
You might baulk at the amounts
of materials and energy that have
gone into making it, but
buildings don't just happen.
They have to be willed,
forced and wrangled into existence,
and, as to the embodied energy,
that's incalculable, really,
and, in this case,
its costs are incalculable,
because the greatest amount of
energy in a building like this,
is human energy.
At times, it even seems superhuman.
I usually find that the greater
the will, the greater the building.
It's kind of a mother ship. The
kitchen is the heart of the home.
My natural instinct is to design
rhythmic spaces.
The design part was tricky.
We fought a lot.
We don't have the money.
We still don't even have the security
that we're going to get the money.
He now has to work harder
or make some changes.
So close to it being something.
No, it's a fantasy
until it's finished, Martin.