Grand Designs (1999–…): Season 13, Episode 5 - Strathaven, South Lanarkshire - full transcript
The word hobby for most of us
suggests, I don't know,
collecting beer mats or, erm,
growing prize tomatoes.
For some people, of course, hobby
means flying light aircraft,
so imagine if you were part of that
happy band, that eccentric breed.
How excited you would
feel about turning your hobby
into your business,
about owning an airfield and then
being given the opportunity
to build a house there.
It would be like
living over the shop.
Ever since he was a boy
Colin MacKinnon has been obsessed
with flying.
So, when he inherited
£60,000 eight years ago,
he did what most aviation nuts
could only dream of.
He bought an airfield
and set up his own flying school
in Strathaven near Glasgow.
It's a lifestyle
sort of thing, really.
It's not something you go into
to make loads of money,
it's not something you go in,
if only, to do not very much work
and just watch the cash roll in.
You've got to be passionate about it.
It's not a Monday to Friday,
nine to five job.
It's a bizarre and wonderful life.
And Colin's got a daredevil
to share it with.
Spanish-born Marta Briongos.
She's a trapeze artist.
When not performing death-defying
stunts, she teaches... hovercraft.
I am the hovergirl! Is just
an extra business for the airfield.
And it is something that is fun,
people enjoy it.
At the moment
they live two miles away,
but with its madcap collection of
planes and hovercraft, the airfield
in this blustery part of Scotland,
is Marta and Colin's true home.
Determined to be closer
to that, they have got permission to
build a new house here
tied to the business.
How do you describe the building to
people that do not know
that you are building?
It's going to have two floors
because we will have most of our
living space on the first floor which
will give us a better view
over the entire airfield.
So it's going to be
a bit like a control tower?
A little bit like a sort of
control tower, yes.
It means we can have a good look over
things, see what is going on,
but living on the first floor
gives us privacy,
so it means when people are taxiing
round, they're not looking in
your living room window.
A very modern building.
Very different from the traditional
Scottish way of building.
Because normally it is wooden frames
and our building is a steel frame.
And then it is going to be
clad in metal,
corrugated aluminium
rather than corrugated steel.
We thought, we felt it had to be
something in keeping with
the airfield and because the hangars
are clad in metal,
we thought... So you are going to
make a metal clad house? Yeah, yeah.
The airfield's 850 feet above sea
level on a very exposed site.
So, there are practical reasons
for choosing to make their house
out of a hard wearing material.
We wanted something absolutely solid
with the wind up here, there is
no way it was going to budge.
It's windy today.
What's it like in October
or January?
October can be very, very wild.
We get winds of 100 miles
an hour here at least once
a year, I think.
I mean, that's a lot of wind!
We get snow up here, sometimes you
can be snowed in up here.
Marta, what does it represent
for you, this place?
I never lived more than seven years
anywhere in my life and
I lived in different countries
and I love Scotland.
Every time I go to a new place,
I have always took my hat off
and say this is home,
but this I feel it's going to
be my home home, las home home!
Big home! Big home!
The 100mph storms
up here demand a durable, robust
building, one inspired by aircraft
hangars that can be put up quickly.
So, Colin and Marta will have
a dazzlingly complicated
but elegant 335-piece steel frame,
carefully designed
and cross-braced to resist
the fearsome wind up here.
The sides and roof of the house
will be super-insulated
and clad in corrugated aluminium
to resist corrosion.
They'll also be putting in
thick curtain wall glazing with
a heat-reflective coating.
Inside, the ground floor will house
a state-of-the-art wood pellet
boiler, the garage,
four curved bedrooms with facilities
and a slender spiral staircase which
will lead up to the first floor -
Colin and Marta's
elevated private apartment,
containing a master bedroom,
a veranda,
snug and the open plan centrepiece
of their live/work home.
This will be their air traffic
control centre for living in,
a sitting room, kitchen
and balcony where
they can keep track of everything
going on outside.
Under the large glazed roof light
on the second will sit an
office for Colin
and a painting studio for Marta.
Built in steel and clad in metal,
this will be a domestic
house built like, well, an aircraft
hangar, using commercial techniques,
but it is much more complex
and it would demand every skill
of a professional project manager,
let alone a beginner like Colin.
Who's going to be the site
supervisor? That's us!
I mean, we're here every day
anyway because of work,
so in that sense, we are
always going to be involved in it.
If we employed a project manager
to be here every day,
we'd then end up being on top of the
project manager
and it'd be a layer of complexity
and potentially
confusion as well as to actually
who was in charge of this.
And the building programme is going
to take how long?
We want to get the house wind and
waterproof, ready for winter.
The inside of it, then we can
work away on over winter
and into next year.
This time next year
we'll have our airfield open day
and it would be very nice to
have our house finished. Next summer?
Next summer. OK. How much money
have you got to spend?
Somewhere between 450 and £500,000.
We were hoping to do the house
without having to get
a mortgage or borrow any money,
because we have some money
from selling our previous house.
I hope it's enough.
Probably not. Probably not.
So, where does the money come
from then, if you go over?
Well... Well...
We're talking at one time.
We've got a nice painting
that I bought many, many,
many years ago which might be
worth 40 or £50,000.
Well, they might need more
contingency than that,
because £100,000, a fifth of Colin's
budget, is tied up in an insurance
claim to reimburse him for an event
that almost destroyed his business.
A couple of years ago last May,
we had a fire in our neighbour's
garden next door that spread through
this wall. It set fire to an aircraft
that was parked here. Unfortunately
because of the heat and the smoke,
every aircraft that was in the hangar
here, 26 aircraft,
were written off
as a result of the fire.
We're still arguing
about the insurance.
In the meantime, Colin cannot even
raise a mortgage to cover
the shortfall,
because he can't get one.
His project is unusual in that it is
attached to the airfield business.
Without that money in place,
Colin and Marta are starting
a project they may not be able to
finish, a project in any case,
that they are not experienced
or adept enough to finish.
This is going to be
a technical piece
of ambitious,
expensive construction.
You can think of Marta and Colin's
house as a big shed, can't you?
It's going to be clad in aluminium,
it's going to have this big,
sweeping roof and it's even going to
have some curves on it as well.
But, of course, being a home it also
needs to be beautifully crafted,
really well put together with
fantastically detailed junctions.
It wants to look like a piece
of architecture.
It does not want to look
like that(!)
Colin's lack of experience is a
significant worry for his architect,
Richard Murphy.
If you are going to do a steel-framed
building, you've got to get
all the details very just so.
In order to make the thing add up,
Colin is sort of
being the builder, he is organising
all the subcontractors.
I'm just going to keep my fingers
crossed that it all
kind of works out well because
there's all the recipes for a project
that could go spectacularly wrong.
In July, one month in,
a commercial steel works start
making the 335-piece metal frame.
This is no heavy-duty warehouse
skeleton, though.
These are slender
and refined pieces.
It's been challenging.
When I first met the architect
and engineer, it started to become
apparent that they were looking for
something a bit special, you know,
in terms of the steelwork designs.
These commercial fabricators
are the first in a long line of
specialist industrial contractors
Colin's using to build his house.
He's booked an expert groundworker
to do the foundations,
but they suddenly cancel
out of the blue.
We were told that the chap who was
going to do the groundwork
was not available until August
and the steel is coming in six days'
time, so Colin was amazing
and decided to go and have a crash
course in how to do the foundations.
In the true pioneering spirit
of aviation, Colin is stepping
bravely into the unknown
and doing the foundations himself.
Except he has no real idea
what he's doing.
The great thing about the internet
is you can just go online, 24 hours
a day and you can go and get
information from like,
some of the biggest steel companies
in the world and you can go...
I can have a slightly sleepless night
but at least I think we have a plan!
It's a risky one, though,
as Colin is well aware.
The key thing is
the accuracy of everything.
I mean, the steel, you cannot
stretch it, squeeze it,
you cannot just shave
a bit off it very easily.
It's been made very,
very exact and precise.
The first step is to make up the
bolt boxes on which the house sits.
It's harder than it looks.
That goes first.
No, metal plate on the bottom first.
Metal plate on the bottom first.
The bolt boxes then have to be
placed exactly where the
steel frame will sit.
It's about here somewhere.
I am pretty confident
these are all in the right place now.
Fingers crossed, we are
sort of on schedule.
I hope so, because everything Colin
has learned about ground working
so far comes from
a how-to internet guide.
It almost looks like the photograph.
That's reassuring, sort of.
I often applaud people taking on new
challenges, but this is eccentric.
Even the hovercraft instructor
and trapeze artist
thinks that it's all a step too far.
It feels funny, it feels crazy,
it feels...
..totally crazy!
At the airfield in Strathaven,
Colin is now a month in.
As well as project managing,
he's also been building
the footings of his house
and running his flying business.
He has Marta to help him
and she brings her own brand of
expertise in hovercraft instruction.
Until now, they've been flying
blind, but today the frame arrives
and the accuracy of their
ground works will be tested.
It is one of the key stages
of the house so it's a bit nervous,
thinking is it all going to work?
This is where we find out.
Is it all going to fit together?
It will fit together.
It will fit together.
Colin's brought in a specialist
ground worker
to help finish off the slab.
But that is no guarantee
that the steel columns
will meet the foundation plates.
Hooray!
They fit! Straight on!
Straight on! Is that not stunning?!
I take my hat off to them.
This is a symbolic moment.
The first piece of building to go up
and it fits.
The way those just dropped
almost straight on is just...
..unbelievable really.
It's fantastic. It's just
really, really, really...
..big load off the mind.
The rest of it should just fly up.
And it does, thanks to
the accurate setting out
and Colin's choice of commercial
construction technology
to build his house.
Over the next two days, they manage
to get half the structure up.
It's a sense of achievement.
A great sense of achievement.
It makes me think
that anything that happens,
we will be able to
actually overcome it.
In August,
two months into the project,
the steel skeleton for their house
is up.
I've seen a lot
of steel framed buildings,
but never one that looked
quite so beautiful.
It has a magical ark-like shape,
as much sculpture as structure.
It looks almost heroic, doesn't it,
this building? Don't you think?
It's certainly quite big. Come on!
I'm impressed by it.
It's as high if not higher than that
hangar there and it's on the highest
bit of the land here so it is set
against the sky quite strongly.
The roof, doesn't that look
completely majestic?
I think it's absolutely brilliant
the ridge is curved.
It's an unusual form.
If it was just pointy
like a conventional ridge,
it would look so dull, wouldn't it?
A monopoly house.
The entire thing,
it would change the character of the
entire building, wouldn't it?
It would. I mean, that is
down to Marta in one way.
She wanted curves in the house.
And also aircraft wings
have got curves on them.
The edge of an aircraft wing
has got a curve.
Lots of reasons why it should be
like that. But fundamentally,
it is more beautiful. I think that's
a sign of having a good architect.
It's those tiny little things that
actually turn out to be major things
and just make all the difference
to the project.
Colin's wasting no time
filling in the frame.
On the first floor, he has the next
wave of industrial specialist
contractors putting in the metal
decking for the concrete floor.
And they don't mess around.
It's very quick, what you do,
isn't it? Yeah.
It only took us
three hours yesterday
to get all the decking out.
Half an hour this morning.
Half an hour this morning.
And then you're away.
But presumably, you're used to doing
much bigger buildings than this?
Aye, aye.
We're doing a couple in Glasgow
and Edinburgh. 1,300 metres.
So, this is sort of like a sample,
I presume.
It's just a wee sample!
Normally, these men are on one big
commercial job for weeks at a time,
so it's unusual to see them working
on a small project like this.
You see that shiny decking up there,
it took three hours to put in
and half an hour to fix.
That is one contractor
who specialises in that
because they work in a world
of hospitals and supermarkets
and giant buildings where
the jobs are very finely divided
and one contractor does one thing
and one does another.
Here for example,
there's the steel erector,
the concrete trade people, people
doing the concrete after that.
And each one of those is
a separate business.
Fine if you're building
a 35,000 square feet supermarket.
But not so easy to find
if you are building a house.
It's hardly worth their while
coming here, is it?
This is not an easy way
to build a house.
It means asking a lot of favours
of large firms working
outside their comfort zone,
slotting you in where they can.
It's also turning out
to be expensive.
At the moment, we're probably
?30,000, ?40,000
over what we'd planned to spend.
The quote for the roof
and the cladding on the walls,
that came in more than we thought
it might have come in at.
It's the problem
of using specialists.
There is not a long list of people
to go to for quotes.
The market out there
is not as competitive,
because there are fewer people
who have the capability
and who are willing to quote
for what is a relatively small
project in an industrial sense.
Colin can well do without
more money worries.
He's already waiting on ?100,000
from the insurance claim payout
he needs to finish his house.
On top of that, he's now also got
a 40,000 hole in his budget.
His only saleable assets
are the precious pieces of art
that he's collected over 20 years.
So, he's decided to
sacrifice some of them.
It's mainly Scottish artists,
but not all. It is some collection.
We have put a couple of pictures
up for sale in auction.
They haven't sold yet.
Who is this by?
Judy Ferguson is one of the four
Scottish colourists.
It came up for sale 20 odd years ago
and we had some money from the sale
of some sheep that we had inherited.
Some sheep? Yes. My family had
a croft on the Isle of Skye.
You don't get much for sheep!
You don't get very much for sheep,
but paintings and things were
not as expensive, maybe, then.
It's not unusual for ambitious
projects to be
besieged by problems on all sides.
Money worries, technical issues,
construction headaches.
They are all here,
as well as bad weather.
It's August, but winter seems
to have arrived early.
We are just hoping that we'll get
a nice break for another five
weeks or so to get the house
watertight, wind and water tight.
Fingers crossed.
Since nothing is happening on site,
Colin travels to the milder
climate of Edinburgh
for the day of the auction.
I feel quite nervous, quite excited.
If the painting doesn't sell today,
we will have a ?30,000 or ?40,000
hole in the budget for the house.
So yes, a little bit nervous.
The odd little bead of sweat here.
?33,000 is the lowest Colin is
prepared to sell the painting for.
If no offer reaches that,
he'll walk away with nothing.
We start on this one at 25,000.
At 25,000. 25,000 offered.
At 32,000. Any advance on 32,000?
35,000 on the telephone.
35,000 bid against you in the room.
At 35,000 on the telephone.
Selling at 35,000.
All done at 35,000.
Final time. ?35,000.
It sold, but for 5,000 short
of what he hoped.
It will pay some bills.
That's the... At least it sold.
What the cash doesn't do is
particularly speed up construction.
By November the house is still
nowhere near watertight.
The weather has slowed things down
and it's also beginning
to destroy what they already have.
Marta is fighting back with
the brush and some metal primer.
I think it is one of the
characteristics of the steel,
it rusts, t corrodes.
It is like a cancer that keeps
seeping at the steel
and eventually, obviously,
it flakes and breaks.
There will be worse weather to come.
I hope this delicate looking frame
is capable
of taking more punishment.
Tell me about the durability
of this building
and its resistance to where it is.
Metal is a great thing to
use in the countryside.
If you look around, it's no accident
that all the agricultural buildings
are mostly made of corrugated metal
of one sort or another.
When we first approached Richard,
we said we wanted a steel framed
building that would be
concreted into the ground and solid
and that we wanted a metal roof.
That was part of the original brief
because the weather is key to
everything. It's key to the design,
the engineering, it's key to the
construction now.
And, of course, the house is
an integral part of the business
and that is all to do
with the weather as well.
So, we're just obsessed
with the weather!
With good reason.
Strathaven is on the same line
of latitude
as Moscow and Copenhagen.
Any house built here needs
to be super durable.
As becomes abundantly clear
in December.
The Met Office has issued
a red alert for Scotland,
its highest possible warning,
over fears that the wind there
will cause widespread damage
and destruction.
So far, the steel frame is
holding its own
in the worst storms for 100 years.
And what's even more incredible,
there are still people working.
They really are trying their best
to get things done.
This is the wettest I've actually
ever seen it here at the airfield.
In these conditions,
everything takes twice as long.
On the roof,
they are battling the wind,
trying to stop materials
from blowing away.
I've been up here for a long time
so you kind of get used to it.
A wee bit.
Colin's men are caught
in an uncomfortable catch-22.
They need to complete the shell
to stop the weather getting in,
but they can't finish the shell
because of the weather.
It is not a job
for the fainthearted!
We're tough here in Scotland,
you know!
Colin and Marta are now half way
into their planned 12-month project.
Their house has survived
the worst storms in 100 years,
which is the good news.
Of course, as soon as the wind goes,
we end up with snow. So...
The big thing is when you get
really horrible weather like this,
jobs basically take twice as long.
Everything is twice as hard to do.
We are just pushing on
as much as we can.
OK.
"We", being Colin
and one brave roofer,
who is helping him measure
the skylight for his office.
If the weather continues like this,
I can't see Colin finishing
this side of the day of reckoning.
Winter here can be really wild,
850 feet above sea level.
Whatever weather there is,
we're going to get it up here.
It's not just a battle
to get the job done,
but it's also a battle
against the weather.
Three months later,
work still inches forward.
The snow is now replaced by
more wind and rain.
It's still proving nigh-impossible
to make the house weather-tight.
But the glaziers
are doing their best.
Oh, look. There's a piece of glass
going in that hole. That's nice!
As we speak. That's the biggest
piece of glass in the whole house.
Just tell me about this glass
they're putting in?
It's double glazed.
It's quite thick glass because
it's actually taking quite a heavy
structural load with the wind.
Because the glass is so thick,
you can see the colour off it.
I just noticed it driving
along the road there.
There is that glass green tinge,
which is really nice.
I like that.
For a building
descended from an aircraft hangar,
I'd say it's a great improvement
on its parentage.
It's shaping up to be
a great piece of architecture.
As much contemporary Australian
tin farmstead as Scottish hillside.
There's so much glass
that only when the windows go in
can you appreciate
the overall shape.
Nowhere more so
than on the ground floor
with its quirky porthole
bedroom windows.
I'm not a huge fan
of circular windows, generally.
But circular windows downstairs,
don't they look good
in a circular building?
They look fabulous. I think
they look really great.
Somebody was saying
that they had like a boat feeling.
Yeah, light portholes.
Portholes, yeah.
The specialist glaziers
have got over half the windows in,
but while there are still
one or two gaps in the building,
the interior steelwork of the house
is still under threat
from wind and rain.
As you can see, the steels are
starting to corrode a little bit.
We have a little bit of rust.
But we'll just paint that.
I don't think
that's a major problem.
Treat it? Yeah.
A bit of Fertan? Yeah.
And some paint? It will be me who
does it. It'll be you that does it.
It's my job! Treat it, paint it.
It's a simple, if labour-intensive,
fix for their corrosion problem.
But I can see a much longer-term
issue for a building like theirs,
struggling to survive
in THIS climate.
You know, within five minutes
of coming inside this old,
metal caravan,
the whole place steams up.
Of course, that's because
I'm breathing, but also because of
the heater here.
When you heat air, it can absorb
much, much more moisture.
When that warm, moist air,
in a building like this,
touches a cold surface, that's
when you get the condensation.
It's happening on the glass.
It's happening on this uninsulated
metal frame to this window.
Metal is a really,
really good conductor of heat,
so that really does create
all kinds of problems.
Engineers have terms that they use
like "dew point"
and "cold bridging"
for these kind of phenomena.
Imagine, imagine
if you were designing a building,
a house, that was really complicated
and entirely made out of metal.
Imagine the problems
you'd make for yourself.
Like in that building over there.
Preventing condensation
isn't simple.
The key thing is thermal breaks
and lots of them
like these pink rubber
insulating pads
to separate the interior metal
from the exterior metal.
Then there is a vapour barrier
and lots and lots
of thick spun wool insulation.
It's designed so that if it gets
damp, it can then dry out
and it'll still fulfil all its
insulation properties and functions.
Outside the insulation
goes the aluminium flashing.
This provides a watertight frame
to hold the cladding in place.
But it's bespoke
and it's a nightmare to install.
It's all been drawn up and
fabricated, and there's quite complex
shapes to these flashings.
They've actually had to come here,
measure it, go away,
get it fabricated, get it painted the
particular colour for the building,
then bring it down here, put it up
there, work out what extra bits
they have to adjust it, take it down,
readjust it, take it back up there.
It ends up lots of processes
for just putting a piece of metal
onto the side of the house.
It's the problem with it
being very bespoke,
with it being a very individual job.
For the fitters, who usually do
fast repetitive jobs
where they can be in and out
in a day,
this intricate work is torturous.
Just those details, very tricky.
Oh, it is frustrating.
There's days you want to go home,
but...
What can you do? That's the job.
Work that Colin expected
to take a week
stretches on for
three long months.
But, finally, in August 2012,
over a year into their project,
they're able to start the aluminium
corrugated cladding.
It's the agricultural bodgers
material of choice,
used on badly built farm buildings
and sheds.
But Colin's ambition is to make it
look beautiful
by treating it
with a rare precision.
You want to make sure you get all
these screws in a nice straight line.
You don't want them
wiggling like that.
Just a few millimetres one way,
a few millimetres the other,
then it starts to look all...
horrible.
It's quick to put on too.
Each sheet takes barely an hour
to cut and fit.
Hold that. Push.
This is shaping up to be far more
than just another aircraft hangar.
I think it will be a worthwhile
addition
to an elite group of metal buildings
already from Glasgow.
The Zaha Hadid's angular
Riverside Museum Of Transport.
And Norman Foster's 3,000-seater
auditorium, the Armadillo,
sensuously wrapped in aluminium.
These buildings are quick to put up.
They are relatively cheap and they
rely on a big structural steel frame
to keep them in the air.
It's interesting, but until now
nobody's ever exploited this
technology for building a house.
Like these, I think
Colin and Marta's home
may well be an outstanding piece
of metal sculpture.
It's a staggeringly good-looking
building, but for Colin and Marta
this might be as good as it gets
because after the cladding
is finished,
they'll be down to
their last 20,000.
We're waiting for money
to come in from an accident
we had three years ago here
when a neighbour accidentally
set fire to the hangar.
I'd never thought that sort of thing
would take three years.
At the moment, we could have
thrown on, you know, half a dozen
joiners, half a dozen plasterers etc
onto the job and get things finished.
It's just, er, at the moment just
working through what we can.
Without the ?100,000
they need from the insurance money,
Colin and Marta won't be able
to finish the interior.
It's not only frustrating,
it's very infuriating.
It makes you feel really angry.
Pissed off.
I feel stressed out and I feel...
It's a big heavy weight
on my shoulders.
To help her take her mind off
the hole in their finances,
Marta turns to what she knows best.
This is my letting go
and this is fun.
I need fun in my life
and at the moment it's just work!
Work at the airfield.
Work with the house.
It's just work all the time.
I just love it.
When you are doing aerial,
you are just focusing on the
movements, focusing on your body.
So you don't have time to worry.
You're just on the moment,
you are actually doing what
you're doing, totally focused.
Ah!
Whoo!
I've done it! I've done it!
A few days later, and with
plaster boarding, plastering
wiring and plumbing still to do,
Colin and Marta run out of money.
Days turn to months...
Still there is no word
from the insurance company.
Almost two years since they began
building, the insurance company
hand over 7,000
and then a further 15,000,
allowing Colin to plasterboard.
But releasing money
in small amounts like this
makes project planning impossible.
I don't think I'm project managing.
The whole thing has got a life
of its own and it's like
hanging on for dear life,
rather than managing it!
It is a pain. It's a stress.
It's a hassle.
And it's very, very slow.
Getting money in dribs and drabs
makes for a very sluggish
and draining way of working.
What is planned as a kind of
intensive campaign,
on your part as homeowners,
devoting a huge amount of energy,
ends up getting
stretched into infinity
and you suddenly have to start
finding reserves of energy
and stamina you didn't expect
to have to look for.
The original idea, it would have
been weatherproof by the autumn
and then we'd have winter,
which is a quiet time for business,
to be able to concentrate
on the house.
Instead, here we are
in the middle of summer...
albeit it's a quiet day today
with the weather, and we're
in the middle of trying to...
And it's sucking up
all this time and energy, yeah.
Sucking up time and energy.
Colin is very positive. And you?
I am unable to see into the future.
I'm more of the present.
I find it difficult to deal with
thinking when the house
will be finished.
I know we will finish. Yeah, yeah.
We shout at each other.
I was going to say,
who do you shout...?
You need to shout at somebody
in these situations.
We do shout at each other.
A bit of Spanish, Latino.
Yeah, the temper!
Shout and scream
and then stomp around.
I can always escape
to the airfield.
The only problem when we come here,
I won't be able to
do that once we're here. So...
I'll build another. Go up.
At least they can
laugh about their arguments.
Their resilience is extraordinary.
I don't know many
who would still be smiling
two years into a building project
that was supposed to take
just 12 months.
Do you know, when I think about it,
it's a miracle
that Marta and Colin have built
anything at all on that site.
They survived that terrible ordeal
of trying to use
a building technology and process
clearly unsuited
to what they need. They have
survived two winters there,
terrible weather
in a really exposed part.
And, they are surviving
all their money woes.
They are, like the early pioneers
of flight...
..adventurers.
They are stayers.
They are still there.
For over two years, Colin
and Marta have fought tool,
tooth and nail to build their rather
striking metal house.
They have braved the worst
storms this century,
coped with a complex building method
and battled money problems
all for the love of their airfield
and Colin's passion for flying.
Beautiful.
Beautiful day for it, isn't it?
I'm looking for the house.
I'm looking for that
glinting, little...
..tin shack.
As the only metal
building for miles around,
it sparkles like a shiny,
tin jewel in the landscape.
The house looks fantastic.
It's an airship,
straight out of the pages of some
futuristic graphic novel.
Three almost disconnected layers,
hovering above one another.
Blocks floating above curves,
tethered under
a giant floating roof.
At long last, flying nut Colin has
his own aircraft hangar to live in.
Hello. Good to see you. Hello.
Are you well? Yeah, very well.
I've come in the right way
this time.
Yeah, it's only a field,
you've got to come by air.
On the ground, you're looking at
this building
and you look up at it
and you see it reflects the sky.
Whatever the sky is doing, it's
doing, you know. It sparkles.
When the sun's out,
shining off it, it sparkles.
You can see it from 20 miles away.
I still maintain, I think
the best view of this building
is from right over there
when you see hangar one, hangar
two,
hangar three, hangar four,
hangar five.
COLIN CHUCKLES
Very few houses have ever
succeeded in making a very humble
material, like corrugated cladding,
a noble one.
This sort of elevates that material,
doesn't it?
It's certainly a glamorous building.
It looks like a sculpture, actually.
I don't know if sexy's the word...
It's curvaceous. It's curvy.
Yes, it's sexy, it's very elegant.
I think it's a
hugely successful building.
The interesting test is when
you look at a building and think,
"What else could have gone there?"
It's hard to think of anything
else that would work.
The sky here changes
all the time. Yeah.
It always has clouds but the clouds
have different colours,
different grades, different shades.
That reflects in the house.
Every day you look at the house
and it looks different.
I think few airfields in Britain
can boast a building so beautiful,
so full of zest and so appropriate.
This is also a place of work
from where Colin and Marta intend
to keep tabs on their airfield.
Oh, look!
Yeah, so...
You are masters, aren't you,
of this landscape. You've got a
great view over the runway.
A fantastic view over the airfield.
Over the main runway,
crosswind runways,
just seeing what's going on.
We don't have a full air traffic
control service here,
and all that sort of stuff.
It's an informal version.
But this is... But we still have that
responsibility for what goes on.
It enables us to have a quick
look around and see what's going on.
How are you going to stop people
just wandering in there?
The house is on the airfield.
It's another building here.
That's one of the concerns I have.
We'll have to, find as we live here,
we encounter the problem,
we'll have to work on it.
It's like being a farmer. Whatever
you have to be close to, what's there
but we have to work in some space.
This is a building assembled
using industrial technology.
Designed to be robust and resist
the 100 mile-an-hour winds up here.
But despite the abundance of steel
indoors, it feels good and cosy.
It's six metres wide.
In the scale of things,
it doesn't look chunky,
it just looks solid, it looks
reassuring but it doesn't look heavy.
It looks solid and reassuring
and it's the same reassurance
you get on a boat with a steel
frame, or an airship, perhaps.
Yeah, you see a spar on the wing of
an aircraft, you think,
"That's what taking the load. That's
what's giving it its strength.
No house on an airfield would be
complete without its galley.
And trapeze artist Marta's brought
some serious flamboyance into hers.
Marta, it's a very "you" colour.
Yeah, it's a colourful place.
It's carmine red
with twinkly bits.
It's the only slab of colour,
though, so far. There's no...
And the paintings? Mmm,
and the paintings, of course, yes.
And big slabs of green. And very big
slabs of green. And blue.
And blue today.
I like blocks of colours.
At the moment I quite like having
the house white.
I'll live with it
and see how it goes.
Like a primer on the canvas? Yeah.
Then, bit by bit...
I like the idea of having nice
white pristine lines
in the kitchen and then have some
"shoom!" colour.
Some what colour?
Some "shoom" colour.
Do you not have any tins of that
in your house?
It's next to the tartan paint
in the supermarket. Oh, yeah.
It's all very contemporary
and sleek.
But there is still work
to do in the house.
The top floor attic needs light
fittings and painting.
But, at the moment, Colin and Marta
just don't have the money to do it.
So the deal is that the insurance
company still haven't paid up?
We haven't finished all the insurance
stuff. We've another meeting next
week and hope that will push it on.
It's frustrating.
We'll get there, as Colin says.
I'm sure they will.
If the beauty of what they've
achieved already is anything
to go by, it will be outstanding.
Upstairs is really
the first class cabin.
The sculptural downstairs bedrooms
are more premium economy.
They are deliberately functional
and small.
Yeah, welcome to the guest suite.
This is the guest... Bedroom.
Very private, these rooms,
aren't they?
There's a lot of things that can be
happening around the airfield
and people wandering around.
We've got our accommodation, our main
accommodation upstairs. Yeah.
Downstairs, here we've got
guest rooms.
One addition which just
gets around that problem
of the claustrophobia of being...
If you're in bed...
Can you lie down, please.
Then you can look out the window.
Yeah, I can see that. There's all
kinds of activity out there.
From outside, if you wanted to
look in,
you'd actually have to bend.
It's small enough to still maintain
the privacy in the room, isn't it?
Somebody described
this as a sleeping pod.
I thought that was quite the thing.
When we have guests,
we don't really want them
to be in their bedrooms,
other than sleeping.
We'd like to enjoy
their company upstairs
in the main part of the house.
We have the bigger spaces.
Upstairs is where the action is.
Where the elegant bones of this
mighty airship are on show.
And, where the goings and comings
of air traffic outside
provide the entertainment.
When Colin and Marta finally get
the money they need
to finish it completely,
they reckon it will have cost them
?580,000.
80,000 over what they expected.
Are you pleased with the building?
Yeah.
The biggest, biggest thing is we are
actually going to be where we
want to be at the end, which is
where we are going to have no debts,
no mortgage and a really fantastic
house. And a beautiful house.
Exactly, who needs the money
in the bank
when you've got
a house like this to enjoy?
Yeah, we don't need to spend any
money travelling to work!
Yeah.
I love the whole of it.
In here, at this table,
looking at the sky there
and the landscape and I say,
"Wow!" That's all I can say.
What have you learned about him
in the process?
How focused and determined...
Dogged.
If he wants to go there,
he will go there.
His main work has been the airfield
and the house
and nothing has been in his way
with that. What about Marta?
What have you learned about her? I
haven't learnt anything new, as such.
I think it's just more of a respect
for what's there already.
I've already known that she's
a stubborn, pain in the arse!
But, erm... Yeah. This would not
have happened without Colin.
And I wouldn't be here and doing all
this stuff without it being for her.
So, that's it. It her fault.
If you were to do this again...
I mean, is there something you would
have avoided or have changed?
I think the building is amazing.
It's fantastic,
it's going to be an amazing house
and I'm loving it now
and, no doubt, I'll love it always.
But, is it worth it?
All the stress, all the pain.
It's not that it's not worth it,
it's why?
Why does it have to be so harsh
and difficult?
Why building a house has to be
so painful? It is just, "Why?"
Because making anything
outstanding on this planet,
anything that's original
and crafted, is hard won.
Colin and Marta's experience
bears witness to that,
more so than they could ever
have anticipated.
You know that flight you get
where you turn up at the airport,
there's a delay and you get
on the plane and there is fog and
eventually the flight's cancelled
and then you can't get
your money back?
Really, in a way,
the story of this building
resembles that tale of events,
doesn't it?
Except, you mustn't confuse
the end with the means,
the outcome with the process,
or, for that matter,
a plane with a building because some
of the finest buildings,
the most exciting buildings on this
planet have had difficult histories.
Difficult births...
I suppose, that's part
of patronage, isn't it?
I think this place is set
to join their ranks.
I think, it's a
very fine building indeed.
We're building a very contemporary
house but with rather traditional
Japanese elements.
How come they measured
that opening wrong?
There isn't an architect
with the job. There's no planning,
there's no details.
My underlying fear is that there
is going to be a large calamity.
This seemed so simple.
It was not simple at all.
I've built kitchen cabinets before.
Does that count?
suggests, I don't know,
collecting beer mats or, erm,
growing prize tomatoes.
For some people, of course, hobby
means flying light aircraft,
so imagine if you were part of that
happy band, that eccentric breed.
How excited you would
feel about turning your hobby
into your business,
about owning an airfield and then
being given the opportunity
to build a house there.
It would be like
living over the shop.
Ever since he was a boy
Colin MacKinnon has been obsessed
with flying.
So, when he inherited
£60,000 eight years ago,
he did what most aviation nuts
could only dream of.
He bought an airfield
and set up his own flying school
in Strathaven near Glasgow.
It's a lifestyle
sort of thing, really.
It's not something you go into
to make loads of money,
it's not something you go in,
if only, to do not very much work
and just watch the cash roll in.
You've got to be passionate about it.
It's not a Monday to Friday,
nine to five job.
It's a bizarre and wonderful life.
And Colin's got a daredevil
to share it with.
Spanish-born Marta Briongos.
She's a trapeze artist.
When not performing death-defying
stunts, she teaches... hovercraft.
I am the hovergirl! Is just
an extra business for the airfield.
And it is something that is fun,
people enjoy it.
At the moment
they live two miles away,
but with its madcap collection of
planes and hovercraft, the airfield
in this blustery part of Scotland,
is Marta and Colin's true home.
Determined to be closer
to that, they have got permission to
build a new house here
tied to the business.
How do you describe the building to
people that do not know
that you are building?
It's going to have two floors
because we will have most of our
living space on the first floor which
will give us a better view
over the entire airfield.
So it's going to be
a bit like a control tower?
A little bit like a sort of
control tower, yes.
It means we can have a good look over
things, see what is going on,
but living on the first floor
gives us privacy,
so it means when people are taxiing
round, they're not looking in
your living room window.
A very modern building.
Very different from the traditional
Scottish way of building.
Because normally it is wooden frames
and our building is a steel frame.
And then it is going to be
clad in metal,
corrugated aluminium
rather than corrugated steel.
We thought, we felt it had to be
something in keeping with
the airfield and because the hangars
are clad in metal,
we thought... So you are going to
make a metal clad house? Yeah, yeah.
The airfield's 850 feet above sea
level on a very exposed site.
So, there are practical reasons
for choosing to make their house
out of a hard wearing material.
We wanted something absolutely solid
with the wind up here, there is
no way it was going to budge.
It's windy today.
What's it like in October
or January?
October can be very, very wild.
We get winds of 100 miles
an hour here at least once
a year, I think.
I mean, that's a lot of wind!
We get snow up here, sometimes you
can be snowed in up here.
Marta, what does it represent
for you, this place?
I never lived more than seven years
anywhere in my life and
I lived in different countries
and I love Scotland.
Every time I go to a new place,
I have always took my hat off
and say this is home,
but this I feel it's going to
be my home home, las home home!
Big home! Big home!
The 100mph storms
up here demand a durable, robust
building, one inspired by aircraft
hangars that can be put up quickly.
So, Colin and Marta will have
a dazzlingly complicated
but elegant 335-piece steel frame,
carefully designed
and cross-braced to resist
the fearsome wind up here.
The sides and roof of the house
will be super-insulated
and clad in corrugated aluminium
to resist corrosion.
They'll also be putting in
thick curtain wall glazing with
a heat-reflective coating.
Inside, the ground floor will house
a state-of-the-art wood pellet
boiler, the garage,
four curved bedrooms with facilities
and a slender spiral staircase which
will lead up to the first floor -
Colin and Marta's
elevated private apartment,
containing a master bedroom,
a veranda,
snug and the open plan centrepiece
of their live/work home.
This will be their air traffic
control centre for living in,
a sitting room, kitchen
and balcony where
they can keep track of everything
going on outside.
Under the large glazed roof light
on the second will sit an
office for Colin
and a painting studio for Marta.
Built in steel and clad in metal,
this will be a domestic
house built like, well, an aircraft
hangar, using commercial techniques,
but it is much more complex
and it would demand every skill
of a professional project manager,
let alone a beginner like Colin.
Who's going to be the site
supervisor? That's us!
I mean, we're here every day
anyway because of work,
so in that sense, we are
always going to be involved in it.
If we employed a project manager
to be here every day,
we'd then end up being on top of the
project manager
and it'd be a layer of complexity
and potentially
confusion as well as to actually
who was in charge of this.
And the building programme is going
to take how long?
We want to get the house wind and
waterproof, ready for winter.
The inside of it, then we can
work away on over winter
and into next year.
This time next year
we'll have our airfield open day
and it would be very nice to
have our house finished. Next summer?
Next summer. OK. How much money
have you got to spend?
Somewhere between 450 and £500,000.
We were hoping to do the house
without having to get
a mortgage or borrow any money,
because we have some money
from selling our previous house.
I hope it's enough.
Probably not. Probably not.
So, where does the money come
from then, if you go over?
Well... Well...
We're talking at one time.
We've got a nice painting
that I bought many, many,
many years ago which might be
worth 40 or £50,000.
Well, they might need more
contingency than that,
because £100,000, a fifth of Colin's
budget, is tied up in an insurance
claim to reimburse him for an event
that almost destroyed his business.
A couple of years ago last May,
we had a fire in our neighbour's
garden next door that spread through
this wall. It set fire to an aircraft
that was parked here. Unfortunately
because of the heat and the smoke,
every aircraft that was in the hangar
here, 26 aircraft,
were written off
as a result of the fire.
We're still arguing
about the insurance.
In the meantime, Colin cannot even
raise a mortgage to cover
the shortfall,
because he can't get one.
His project is unusual in that it is
attached to the airfield business.
Without that money in place,
Colin and Marta are starting
a project they may not be able to
finish, a project in any case,
that they are not experienced
or adept enough to finish.
This is going to be
a technical piece
of ambitious,
expensive construction.
You can think of Marta and Colin's
house as a big shed, can't you?
It's going to be clad in aluminium,
it's going to have this big,
sweeping roof and it's even going to
have some curves on it as well.
But, of course, being a home it also
needs to be beautifully crafted,
really well put together with
fantastically detailed junctions.
It wants to look like a piece
of architecture.
It does not want to look
like that(!)
Colin's lack of experience is a
significant worry for his architect,
Richard Murphy.
If you are going to do a steel-framed
building, you've got to get
all the details very just so.
In order to make the thing add up,
Colin is sort of
being the builder, he is organising
all the subcontractors.
I'm just going to keep my fingers
crossed that it all
kind of works out well because
there's all the recipes for a project
that could go spectacularly wrong.
In July, one month in,
a commercial steel works start
making the 335-piece metal frame.
This is no heavy-duty warehouse
skeleton, though.
These are slender
and refined pieces.
It's been challenging.
When I first met the architect
and engineer, it started to become
apparent that they were looking for
something a bit special, you know,
in terms of the steelwork designs.
These commercial fabricators
are the first in a long line of
specialist industrial contractors
Colin's using to build his house.
He's booked an expert groundworker
to do the foundations,
but they suddenly cancel
out of the blue.
We were told that the chap who was
going to do the groundwork
was not available until August
and the steel is coming in six days'
time, so Colin was amazing
and decided to go and have a crash
course in how to do the foundations.
In the true pioneering spirit
of aviation, Colin is stepping
bravely into the unknown
and doing the foundations himself.
Except he has no real idea
what he's doing.
The great thing about the internet
is you can just go online, 24 hours
a day and you can go and get
information from like,
some of the biggest steel companies
in the world and you can go...
I can have a slightly sleepless night
but at least I think we have a plan!
It's a risky one, though,
as Colin is well aware.
The key thing is
the accuracy of everything.
I mean, the steel, you cannot
stretch it, squeeze it,
you cannot just shave
a bit off it very easily.
It's been made very,
very exact and precise.
The first step is to make up the
bolt boxes on which the house sits.
It's harder than it looks.
That goes first.
No, metal plate on the bottom first.
Metal plate on the bottom first.
The bolt boxes then have to be
placed exactly where the
steel frame will sit.
It's about here somewhere.
I am pretty confident
these are all in the right place now.
Fingers crossed, we are
sort of on schedule.
I hope so, because everything Colin
has learned about ground working
so far comes from
a how-to internet guide.
It almost looks like the photograph.
That's reassuring, sort of.
I often applaud people taking on new
challenges, but this is eccentric.
Even the hovercraft instructor
and trapeze artist
thinks that it's all a step too far.
It feels funny, it feels crazy,
it feels...
..totally crazy!
At the airfield in Strathaven,
Colin is now a month in.
As well as project managing,
he's also been building
the footings of his house
and running his flying business.
He has Marta to help him
and she brings her own brand of
expertise in hovercraft instruction.
Until now, they've been flying
blind, but today the frame arrives
and the accuracy of their
ground works will be tested.
It is one of the key stages
of the house so it's a bit nervous,
thinking is it all going to work?
This is where we find out.
Is it all going to fit together?
It will fit together.
It will fit together.
Colin's brought in a specialist
ground worker
to help finish off the slab.
But that is no guarantee
that the steel columns
will meet the foundation plates.
Hooray!
They fit! Straight on!
Straight on! Is that not stunning?!
I take my hat off to them.
This is a symbolic moment.
The first piece of building to go up
and it fits.
The way those just dropped
almost straight on is just...
..unbelievable really.
It's fantastic. It's just
really, really, really...
..big load off the mind.
The rest of it should just fly up.
And it does, thanks to
the accurate setting out
and Colin's choice of commercial
construction technology
to build his house.
Over the next two days, they manage
to get half the structure up.
It's a sense of achievement.
A great sense of achievement.
It makes me think
that anything that happens,
we will be able to
actually overcome it.
In August,
two months into the project,
the steel skeleton for their house
is up.
I've seen a lot
of steel framed buildings,
but never one that looked
quite so beautiful.
It has a magical ark-like shape,
as much sculpture as structure.
It looks almost heroic, doesn't it,
this building? Don't you think?
It's certainly quite big. Come on!
I'm impressed by it.
It's as high if not higher than that
hangar there and it's on the highest
bit of the land here so it is set
against the sky quite strongly.
The roof, doesn't that look
completely majestic?
I think it's absolutely brilliant
the ridge is curved.
It's an unusual form.
If it was just pointy
like a conventional ridge,
it would look so dull, wouldn't it?
A monopoly house.
The entire thing,
it would change the character of the
entire building, wouldn't it?
It would. I mean, that is
down to Marta in one way.
She wanted curves in the house.
And also aircraft wings
have got curves on them.
The edge of an aircraft wing
has got a curve.
Lots of reasons why it should be
like that. But fundamentally,
it is more beautiful. I think that's
a sign of having a good architect.
It's those tiny little things that
actually turn out to be major things
and just make all the difference
to the project.
Colin's wasting no time
filling in the frame.
On the first floor, he has the next
wave of industrial specialist
contractors putting in the metal
decking for the concrete floor.
And they don't mess around.
It's very quick, what you do,
isn't it? Yeah.
It only took us
three hours yesterday
to get all the decking out.
Half an hour this morning.
Half an hour this morning.
And then you're away.
But presumably, you're used to doing
much bigger buildings than this?
Aye, aye.
We're doing a couple in Glasgow
and Edinburgh. 1,300 metres.
So, this is sort of like a sample,
I presume.
It's just a wee sample!
Normally, these men are on one big
commercial job for weeks at a time,
so it's unusual to see them working
on a small project like this.
You see that shiny decking up there,
it took three hours to put in
and half an hour to fix.
That is one contractor
who specialises in that
because they work in a world
of hospitals and supermarkets
and giant buildings where
the jobs are very finely divided
and one contractor does one thing
and one does another.
Here for example,
there's the steel erector,
the concrete trade people, people
doing the concrete after that.
And each one of those is
a separate business.
Fine if you're building
a 35,000 square feet supermarket.
But not so easy to find
if you are building a house.
It's hardly worth their while
coming here, is it?
This is not an easy way
to build a house.
It means asking a lot of favours
of large firms working
outside their comfort zone,
slotting you in where they can.
It's also turning out
to be expensive.
At the moment, we're probably
?30,000, ?40,000
over what we'd planned to spend.
The quote for the roof
and the cladding on the walls,
that came in more than we thought
it might have come in at.
It's the problem
of using specialists.
There is not a long list of people
to go to for quotes.
The market out there
is not as competitive,
because there are fewer people
who have the capability
and who are willing to quote
for what is a relatively small
project in an industrial sense.
Colin can well do without
more money worries.
He's already waiting on ?100,000
from the insurance claim payout
he needs to finish his house.
On top of that, he's now also got
a 40,000 hole in his budget.
His only saleable assets
are the precious pieces of art
that he's collected over 20 years.
So, he's decided to
sacrifice some of them.
It's mainly Scottish artists,
but not all. It is some collection.
We have put a couple of pictures
up for sale in auction.
They haven't sold yet.
Who is this by?
Judy Ferguson is one of the four
Scottish colourists.
It came up for sale 20 odd years ago
and we had some money from the sale
of some sheep that we had inherited.
Some sheep? Yes. My family had
a croft on the Isle of Skye.
You don't get much for sheep!
You don't get very much for sheep,
but paintings and things were
not as expensive, maybe, then.
It's not unusual for ambitious
projects to be
besieged by problems on all sides.
Money worries, technical issues,
construction headaches.
They are all here,
as well as bad weather.
It's August, but winter seems
to have arrived early.
We are just hoping that we'll get
a nice break for another five
weeks or so to get the house
watertight, wind and water tight.
Fingers crossed.
Since nothing is happening on site,
Colin travels to the milder
climate of Edinburgh
for the day of the auction.
I feel quite nervous, quite excited.
If the painting doesn't sell today,
we will have a ?30,000 or ?40,000
hole in the budget for the house.
So yes, a little bit nervous.
The odd little bead of sweat here.
?33,000 is the lowest Colin is
prepared to sell the painting for.
If no offer reaches that,
he'll walk away with nothing.
We start on this one at 25,000.
At 25,000. 25,000 offered.
At 32,000. Any advance on 32,000?
35,000 on the telephone.
35,000 bid against you in the room.
At 35,000 on the telephone.
Selling at 35,000.
All done at 35,000.
Final time. ?35,000.
It sold, but for 5,000 short
of what he hoped.
It will pay some bills.
That's the... At least it sold.
What the cash doesn't do is
particularly speed up construction.
By November the house is still
nowhere near watertight.
The weather has slowed things down
and it's also beginning
to destroy what they already have.
Marta is fighting back with
the brush and some metal primer.
I think it is one of the
characteristics of the steel,
it rusts, t corrodes.
It is like a cancer that keeps
seeping at the steel
and eventually, obviously,
it flakes and breaks.
There will be worse weather to come.
I hope this delicate looking frame
is capable
of taking more punishment.
Tell me about the durability
of this building
and its resistance to where it is.
Metal is a great thing to
use in the countryside.
If you look around, it's no accident
that all the agricultural buildings
are mostly made of corrugated metal
of one sort or another.
When we first approached Richard,
we said we wanted a steel framed
building that would be
concreted into the ground and solid
and that we wanted a metal roof.
That was part of the original brief
because the weather is key to
everything. It's key to the design,
the engineering, it's key to the
construction now.
And, of course, the house is
an integral part of the business
and that is all to do
with the weather as well.
So, we're just obsessed
with the weather!
With good reason.
Strathaven is on the same line
of latitude
as Moscow and Copenhagen.
Any house built here needs
to be super durable.
As becomes abundantly clear
in December.
The Met Office has issued
a red alert for Scotland,
its highest possible warning,
over fears that the wind there
will cause widespread damage
and destruction.
So far, the steel frame is
holding its own
in the worst storms for 100 years.
And what's even more incredible,
there are still people working.
They really are trying their best
to get things done.
This is the wettest I've actually
ever seen it here at the airfield.
In these conditions,
everything takes twice as long.
On the roof,
they are battling the wind,
trying to stop materials
from blowing away.
I've been up here for a long time
so you kind of get used to it.
A wee bit.
Colin's men are caught
in an uncomfortable catch-22.
They need to complete the shell
to stop the weather getting in,
but they can't finish the shell
because of the weather.
It is not a job
for the fainthearted!
We're tough here in Scotland,
you know!
Colin and Marta are now half way
into their planned 12-month project.
Their house has survived
the worst storms in 100 years,
which is the good news.
Of course, as soon as the wind goes,
we end up with snow. So...
The big thing is when you get
really horrible weather like this,
jobs basically take twice as long.
Everything is twice as hard to do.
We are just pushing on
as much as we can.
OK.
"We", being Colin
and one brave roofer,
who is helping him measure
the skylight for his office.
If the weather continues like this,
I can't see Colin finishing
this side of the day of reckoning.
Winter here can be really wild,
850 feet above sea level.
Whatever weather there is,
we're going to get it up here.
It's not just a battle
to get the job done,
but it's also a battle
against the weather.
Three months later,
work still inches forward.
The snow is now replaced by
more wind and rain.
It's still proving nigh-impossible
to make the house weather-tight.
But the glaziers
are doing their best.
Oh, look. There's a piece of glass
going in that hole. That's nice!
As we speak. That's the biggest
piece of glass in the whole house.
Just tell me about this glass
they're putting in?
It's double glazed.
It's quite thick glass because
it's actually taking quite a heavy
structural load with the wind.
Because the glass is so thick,
you can see the colour off it.
I just noticed it driving
along the road there.
There is that glass green tinge,
which is really nice.
I like that.
For a building
descended from an aircraft hangar,
I'd say it's a great improvement
on its parentage.
It's shaping up to be
a great piece of architecture.
As much contemporary Australian
tin farmstead as Scottish hillside.
There's so much glass
that only when the windows go in
can you appreciate
the overall shape.
Nowhere more so
than on the ground floor
with its quirky porthole
bedroom windows.
I'm not a huge fan
of circular windows, generally.
But circular windows downstairs,
don't they look good
in a circular building?
They look fabulous. I think
they look really great.
Somebody was saying
that they had like a boat feeling.
Yeah, light portholes.
Portholes, yeah.
The specialist glaziers
have got over half the windows in,
but while there are still
one or two gaps in the building,
the interior steelwork of the house
is still under threat
from wind and rain.
As you can see, the steels are
starting to corrode a little bit.
We have a little bit of rust.
But we'll just paint that.
I don't think
that's a major problem.
Treat it? Yeah.
A bit of Fertan? Yeah.
And some paint? It will be me who
does it. It'll be you that does it.
It's my job! Treat it, paint it.
It's a simple, if labour-intensive,
fix for their corrosion problem.
But I can see a much longer-term
issue for a building like theirs,
struggling to survive
in THIS climate.
You know, within five minutes
of coming inside this old,
metal caravan,
the whole place steams up.
Of course, that's because
I'm breathing, but also because of
the heater here.
When you heat air, it can absorb
much, much more moisture.
When that warm, moist air,
in a building like this,
touches a cold surface, that's
when you get the condensation.
It's happening on the glass.
It's happening on this uninsulated
metal frame to this window.
Metal is a really,
really good conductor of heat,
so that really does create
all kinds of problems.
Engineers have terms that they use
like "dew point"
and "cold bridging"
for these kind of phenomena.
Imagine, imagine
if you were designing a building,
a house, that was really complicated
and entirely made out of metal.
Imagine the problems
you'd make for yourself.
Like in that building over there.
Preventing condensation
isn't simple.
The key thing is thermal breaks
and lots of them
like these pink rubber
insulating pads
to separate the interior metal
from the exterior metal.
Then there is a vapour barrier
and lots and lots
of thick spun wool insulation.
It's designed so that if it gets
damp, it can then dry out
and it'll still fulfil all its
insulation properties and functions.
Outside the insulation
goes the aluminium flashing.
This provides a watertight frame
to hold the cladding in place.
But it's bespoke
and it's a nightmare to install.
It's all been drawn up and
fabricated, and there's quite complex
shapes to these flashings.
They've actually had to come here,
measure it, go away,
get it fabricated, get it painted the
particular colour for the building,
then bring it down here, put it up
there, work out what extra bits
they have to adjust it, take it down,
readjust it, take it back up there.
It ends up lots of processes
for just putting a piece of metal
onto the side of the house.
It's the problem with it
being very bespoke,
with it being a very individual job.
For the fitters, who usually do
fast repetitive jobs
where they can be in and out
in a day,
this intricate work is torturous.
Just those details, very tricky.
Oh, it is frustrating.
There's days you want to go home,
but...
What can you do? That's the job.
Work that Colin expected
to take a week
stretches on for
three long months.
But, finally, in August 2012,
over a year into their project,
they're able to start the aluminium
corrugated cladding.
It's the agricultural bodgers
material of choice,
used on badly built farm buildings
and sheds.
But Colin's ambition is to make it
look beautiful
by treating it
with a rare precision.
You want to make sure you get all
these screws in a nice straight line.
You don't want them
wiggling like that.
Just a few millimetres one way,
a few millimetres the other,
then it starts to look all...
horrible.
It's quick to put on too.
Each sheet takes barely an hour
to cut and fit.
Hold that. Push.
This is shaping up to be far more
than just another aircraft hangar.
I think it will be a worthwhile
addition
to an elite group of metal buildings
already from Glasgow.
The Zaha Hadid's angular
Riverside Museum Of Transport.
And Norman Foster's 3,000-seater
auditorium, the Armadillo,
sensuously wrapped in aluminium.
These buildings are quick to put up.
They are relatively cheap and they
rely on a big structural steel frame
to keep them in the air.
It's interesting, but until now
nobody's ever exploited this
technology for building a house.
Like these, I think
Colin and Marta's home
may well be an outstanding piece
of metal sculpture.
It's a staggeringly good-looking
building, but for Colin and Marta
this might be as good as it gets
because after the cladding
is finished,
they'll be down to
their last 20,000.
We're waiting for money
to come in from an accident
we had three years ago here
when a neighbour accidentally
set fire to the hangar.
I'd never thought that sort of thing
would take three years.
At the moment, we could have
thrown on, you know, half a dozen
joiners, half a dozen plasterers etc
onto the job and get things finished.
It's just, er, at the moment just
working through what we can.
Without the ?100,000
they need from the insurance money,
Colin and Marta won't be able
to finish the interior.
It's not only frustrating,
it's very infuriating.
It makes you feel really angry.
Pissed off.
I feel stressed out and I feel...
It's a big heavy weight
on my shoulders.
To help her take her mind off
the hole in their finances,
Marta turns to what she knows best.
This is my letting go
and this is fun.
I need fun in my life
and at the moment it's just work!
Work at the airfield.
Work with the house.
It's just work all the time.
I just love it.
When you are doing aerial,
you are just focusing on the
movements, focusing on your body.
So you don't have time to worry.
You're just on the moment,
you are actually doing what
you're doing, totally focused.
Ah!
Whoo!
I've done it! I've done it!
A few days later, and with
plaster boarding, plastering
wiring and plumbing still to do,
Colin and Marta run out of money.
Days turn to months...
Still there is no word
from the insurance company.
Almost two years since they began
building, the insurance company
hand over 7,000
and then a further 15,000,
allowing Colin to plasterboard.
But releasing money
in small amounts like this
makes project planning impossible.
I don't think I'm project managing.
The whole thing has got a life
of its own and it's like
hanging on for dear life,
rather than managing it!
It is a pain. It's a stress.
It's a hassle.
And it's very, very slow.
Getting money in dribs and drabs
makes for a very sluggish
and draining way of working.
What is planned as a kind of
intensive campaign,
on your part as homeowners,
devoting a huge amount of energy,
ends up getting
stretched into infinity
and you suddenly have to start
finding reserves of energy
and stamina you didn't expect
to have to look for.
The original idea, it would have
been weatherproof by the autumn
and then we'd have winter,
which is a quiet time for business,
to be able to concentrate
on the house.
Instead, here we are
in the middle of summer...
albeit it's a quiet day today
with the weather, and we're
in the middle of trying to...
And it's sucking up
all this time and energy, yeah.
Sucking up time and energy.
Colin is very positive. And you?
I am unable to see into the future.
I'm more of the present.
I find it difficult to deal with
thinking when the house
will be finished.
I know we will finish. Yeah, yeah.
We shout at each other.
I was going to say,
who do you shout...?
You need to shout at somebody
in these situations.
We do shout at each other.
A bit of Spanish, Latino.
Yeah, the temper!
Shout and scream
and then stomp around.
I can always escape
to the airfield.
The only problem when we come here,
I won't be able to
do that once we're here. So...
I'll build another. Go up.
At least they can
laugh about their arguments.
Their resilience is extraordinary.
I don't know many
who would still be smiling
two years into a building project
that was supposed to take
just 12 months.
Do you know, when I think about it,
it's a miracle
that Marta and Colin have built
anything at all on that site.
They survived that terrible ordeal
of trying to use
a building technology and process
clearly unsuited
to what they need. They have
survived two winters there,
terrible weather
in a really exposed part.
And, they are surviving
all their money woes.
They are, like the early pioneers
of flight...
..adventurers.
They are stayers.
They are still there.
For over two years, Colin
and Marta have fought tool,
tooth and nail to build their rather
striking metal house.
They have braved the worst
storms this century,
coped with a complex building method
and battled money problems
all for the love of their airfield
and Colin's passion for flying.
Beautiful.
Beautiful day for it, isn't it?
I'm looking for the house.
I'm looking for that
glinting, little...
..tin shack.
As the only metal
building for miles around,
it sparkles like a shiny,
tin jewel in the landscape.
The house looks fantastic.
It's an airship,
straight out of the pages of some
futuristic graphic novel.
Three almost disconnected layers,
hovering above one another.
Blocks floating above curves,
tethered under
a giant floating roof.
At long last, flying nut Colin has
his own aircraft hangar to live in.
Hello. Good to see you. Hello.
Are you well? Yeah, very well.
I've come in the right way
this time.
Yeah, it's only a field,
you've got to come by air.
On the ground, you're looking at
this building
and you look up at it
and you see it reflects the sky.
Whatever the sky is doing, it's
doing, you know. It sparkles.
When the sun's out,
shining off it, it sparkles.
You can see it from 20 miles away.
I still maintain, I think
the best view of this building
is from right over there
when you see hangar one, hangar
two,
hangar three, hangar four,
hangar five.
COLIN CHUCKLES
Very few houses have ever
succeeded in making a very humble
material, like corrugated cladding,
a noble one.
This sort of elevates that material,
doesn't it?
It's certainly a glamorous building.
It looks like a sculpture, actually.
I don't know if sexy's the word...
It's curvaceous. It's curvy.
Yes, it's sexy, it's very elegant.
I think it's a
hugely successful building.
The interesting test is when
you look at a building and think,
"What else could have gone there?"
It's hard to think of anything
else that would work.
The sky here changes
all the time. Yeah.
It always has clouds but the clouds
have different colours,
different grades, different shades.
That reflects in the house.
Every day you look at the house
and it looks different.
I think few airfields in Britain
can boast a building so beautiful,
so full of zest and so appropriate.
This is also a place of work
from where Colin and Marta intend
to keep tabs on their airfield.
Oh, look!
Yeah, so...
You are masters, aren't you,
of this landscape. You've got a
great view over the runway.
A fantastic view over the airfield.
Over the main runway,
crosswind runways,
just seeing what's going on.
We don't have a full air traffic
control service here,
and all that sort of stuff.
It's an informal version.
But this is... But we still have that
responsibility for what goes on.
It enables us to have a quick
look around and see what's going on.
How are you going to stop people
just wandering in there?
The house is on the airfield.
It's another building here.
That's one of the concerns I have.
We'll have to, find as we live here,
we encounter the problem,
we'll have to work on it.
It's like being a farmer. Whatever
you have to be close to, what's there
but we have to work in some space.
This is a building assembled
using industrial technology.
Designed to be robust and resist
the 100 mile-an-hour winds up here.
But despite the abundance of steel
indoors, it feels good and cosy.
It's six metres wide.
In the scale of things,
it doesn't look chunky,
it just looks solid, it looks
reassuring but it doesn't look heavy.
It looks solid and reassuring
and it's the same reassurance
you get on a boat with a steel
frame, or an airship, perhaps.
Yeah, you see a spar on the wing of
an aircraft, you think,
"That's what taking the load. That's
what's giving it its strength.
No house on an airfield would be
complete without its galley.
And trapeze artist Marta's brought
some serious flamboyance into hers.
Marta, it's a very "you" colour.
Yeah, it's a colourful place.
It's carmine red
with twinkly bits.
It's the only slab of colour,
though, so far. There's no...
And the paintings? Mmm,
and the paintings, of course, yes.
And big slabs of green. And very big
slabs of green. And blue.
And blue today.
I like blocks of colours.
At the moment I quite like having
the house white.
I'll live with it
and see how it goes.
Like a primer on the canvas? Yeah.
Then, bit by bit...
I like the idea of having nice
white pristine lines
in the kitchen and then have some
"shoom!" colour.
Some what colour?
Some "shoom" colour.
Do you not have any tins of that
in your house?
It's next to the tartan paint
in the supermarket. Oh, yeah.
It's all very contemporary
and sleek.
But there is still work
to do in the house.
The top floor attic needs light
fittings and painting.
But, at the moment, Colin and Marta
just don't have the money to do it.
So the deal is that the insurance
company still haven't paid up?
We haven't finished all the insurance
stuff. We've another meeting next
week and hope that will push it on.
It's frustrating.
We'll get there, as Colin says.
I'm sure they will.
If the beauty of what they've
achieved already is anything
to go by, it will be outstanding.
Upstairs is really
the first class cabin.
The sculptural downstairs bedrooms
are more premium economy.
They are deliberately functional
and small.
Yeah, welcome to the guest suite.
This is the guest... Bedroom.
Very private, these rooms,
aren't they?
There's a lot of things that can be
happening around the airfield
and people wandering around.
We've got our accommodation, our main
accommodation upstairs. Yeah.
Downstairs, here we've got
guest rooms.
One addition which just
gets around that problem
of the claustrophobia of being...
If you're in bed...
Can you lie down, please.
Then you can look out the window.
Yeah, I can see that. There's all
kinds of activity out there.
From outside, if you wanted to
look in,
you'd actually have to bend.
It's small enough to still maintain
the privacy in the room, isn't it?
Somebody described
this as a sleeping pod.
I thought that was quite the thing.
When we have guests,
we don't really want them
to be in their bedrooms,
other than sleeping.
We'd like to enjoy
their company upstairs
in the main part of the house.
We have the bigger spaces.
Upstairs is where the action is.
Where the elegant bones of this
mighty airship are on show.
And, where the goings and comings
of air traffic outside
provide the entertainment.
When Colin and Marta finally get
the money they need
to finish it completely,
they reckon it will have cost them
?580,000.
80,000 over what they expected.
Are you pleased with the building?
Yeah.
The biggest, biggest thing is we are
actually going to be where we
want to be at the end, which is
where we are going to have no debts,
no mortgage and a really fantastic
house. And a beautiful house.
Exactly, who needs the money
in the bank
when you've got
a house like this to enjoy?
Yeah, we don't need to spend any
money travelling to work!
Yeah.
I love the whole of it.
In here, at this table,
looking at the sky there
and the landscape and I say,
"Wow!" That's all I can say.
What have you learned about him
in the process?
How focused and determined...
Dogged.
If he wants to go there,
he will go there.
His main work has been the airfield
and the house
and nothing has been in his way
with that. What about Marta?
What have you learned about her? I
haven't learnt anything new, as such.
I think it's just more of a respect
for what's there already.
I've already known that she's
a stubborn, pain in the arse!
But, erm... Yeah. This would not
have happened without Colin.
And I wouldn't be here and doing all
this stuff without it being for her.
So, that's it. It her fault.
If you were to do this again...
I mean, is there something you would
have avoided or have changed?
I think the building is amazing.
It's fantastic,
it's going to be an amazing house
and I'm loving it now
and, no doubt, I'll love it always.
But, is it worth it?
All the stress, all the pain.
It's not that it's not worth it,
it's why?
Why does it have to be so harsh
and difficult?
Why building a house has to be
so painful? It is just, "Why?"
Because making anything
outstanding on this planet,
anything that's original
and crafted, is hard won.
Colin and Marta's experience
bears witness to that,
more so than they could ever
have anticipated.
You know that flight you get
where you turn up at the airport,
there's a delay and you get
on the plane and there is fog and
eventually the flight's cancelled
and then you can't get
your money back?
Really, in a way,
the story of this building
resembles that tale of events,
doesn't it?
Except, you mustn't confuse
the end with the means,
the outcome with the process,
or, for that matter,
a plane with a building because some
of the finest buildings,
the most exciting buildings on this
planet have had difficult histories.
Difficult births...
I suppose, that's part
of patronage, isn't it?
I think this place is set
to join their ranks.
I think, it's a
very fine building indeed.
We're building a very contemporary
house but with rather traditional
Japanese elements.
How come they measured
that opening wrong?
There isn't an architect
with the job. There's no planning,
there's no details.
My underlying fear is that there
is going to be a large calamity.
This seemed so simple.
It was not simple at all.
I've built kitchen cabinets before.
Does that count?