Grand Designs (1999–…): Season 13, Episode 6 - Monmouthshire - full transcript
Moving to another culture,
another country, can be a wrench,
especially when
that move is permanent,
when you decide to live there,
so, imagine if you're Japanese,
moving to the UK.
How do you stave off
the homesickness?
Well, I suppose, you could listen to
lots of Japanese music
on a Japanese stereo,
you could get your husband to get
up as a samurai warrior,
or you could build yourself
a permanent, living testament
to your homeland.
Something you can enjoy every day.
You could build yourself
a state-of-the-art Japanese home.
HE SPEAKS JAPANESE
Japan is a land
of intrigue and mystery
that has captured the imagination
of the West for centuries.
It captivated professor of
experimental physics Nigel Hussey,
who met his wife Tamayo
here 16 years ago.
I was working in Tokyo
and I was invited to a party.
I met my friends there,
and just as they opened the door
to the party,
I saw Tamayo there, dancing.
At that moment,
I kind of plotted her downfall!
I'm not sure that's a good way
to describe it!
HE LAUGHS
An hour out of Tokyo
is this small town,
set in a blue plum
and cherry tree forest.
Hey! Konichiwa!
It's here that Tamayo grew up
in a traditional Japanese home,
the style of which she and Nigel
would like to reproduce in Britain.
It's all made of wood and paper.
It's very fragile and very delicate.
So simple, too. Yeah.
That's partly because,
in an earthquake-prone country,
it makes sense to build
with lightweight materials.
Many houses in Japan are only
expected to last 20 years or so,
but still, great pride and care
is taken in making them.
The key elements are
tatami, or straw mats,
fusuma, or sliding doors,
and ornamental room dividers,
or ranma.
THEY SPEAK IN JAPANESE
I think, for a Japanese person,
the integrity of the house
is in the interior,
where they really take a lot of
effort to get the detailing right.
The finishes on the corners,
the clean lines,
everything about the interior,
and it's also the relationship
to the outside,
are what excites us
about Japanese architecture.
When they left Japan 14 years ago,
they decided to live somewhere
that would remind them
of Tamayo's hometown.
And so they moved to Wales.
It was in the Wye Valley
in the Welsh borders that they found
a plot for £375,000.
I say "plot" - it was a house.
A simple, damp dwelling, that they
felt they could improve on for them
and their son.
It was cold, miserable, and
poorly built, with small windows.
How could they not improve on that?
What are your ambitions
for this place?
We're building a very
contemporary house,
but with rather traditional
Japanese elements.
So there's going to be a single room
downstairs with sliding doors,
and on the top floor,
a Japanese bathhouse,
which has an outdoor bath. Wow!
What are you going to do here?
Does this go completely?
I call it a decapitation
of the house.
We're cutting off this big roof and
building upwards into the canopy.
It's not going to look like,
you know,
an adapted brick-built
chalet bungalow?
No, no! Well,
that is not the aspiration here.
Nigel and Tamayo's true ambition
is to bring Japan to Wales
and build a Japanese-influenced
home for their family.
In true samurai fashion,
they're going to behead
their old masonry house,
but keep the first floor
and walls to save some money.
On top of this, they'll build
the house up out of timber panels
in Welsh-grown Japanese larch wood,
adding two storeys.
The whole thing then
gets a wrap of insulation
and more Japanese larch cladding,
transforming it into
a 21st-century woodland home.
Inside, the traditional arrangement
of pokey, small rooms, disappears.
Instead, they'll install
large windows throughout,
and a much more open-plan
arrangement,
with a well-lit kitchen
and dining area facing east.
To one side of the living area,
Nigel and Tamayo
will construct the heart of this
home, a Japanese tatami room
fitted with all the authentic
features that Tamayo will recognise.
Paper sliding doors and straw mats.
On the first floor, there'll be
four bedrooms, one bathroom,
and a small roof deck.
The second floor will be home
to the other big Japanese idea
in the building,
a large roof terrace
fitted with a traditional
outdoor wooden bath, along with
a Japanese shower room and study.
The design is for a wooden,
woodland box of a house,
suited to its setting.
Unlike the house
they've got at the moment.
The brick house doesn't
work in a forest, for me.
I think our design works far
more better with cladding.
We're going to try and use a timber
that's not actually been
used before for a domestic property
in the UK.
Which is? Japanese larch.
Japanese larch is lightweight
and hard-wearing.
It grows in the UK,
but its high silica content
means it blunts saw blades
and it's tricky to mill.
Its poor reputation means
that our construction industry
has forgotten about
larch in Britain.
So Nigel and Tamayo are setting
a brave, experimental example here.
It's not common in this country yet,
to use Japanese larch for timber
frames or cladding, but, why not?
Yeah, yeah. Is it as durable
as European larch is?
Oh, yeah, durability is not an
issue. Strength might be an issue.
And you want to use it
structurally as well?
We're going to use it for both the
timber frame and for the cladding.
So are you doing this
because you miss home,
or because you miss Japan?
Which is it?
Sort of both, maybe. Yes.
So how much is it going to
cost you to do this?
We have a budget, including
everything, of about £175,000.
OK, and who's come up with that?
Is that your architect,
or a quantity surveyor, or..?
That's what I came up with, because
that's what we can afford. OK.
Our architect at the time said,
"You can't do it for that."
Your architect said that? Normally,
they're incredibly optimistic.
We actually had to part company
at the point of, er...
our budgets diverging. Yeah, yeah.
But you're still using
the detailed drawings?
No, well,
we only had the planning drawings.
I can't quite believe
they're taking on a project
this complicated without an
architect.
Not only that, the early costs
for the project were £326,000.
They've got roughly half that.
To save money, they're doing as much
as they can themselves.
We're essentially project managing,
doing the financial management
of this project. OK, yes.
With experience of doing that
before? Is that something you..?
No. No.
I've built kitchen cabinets before.
Does that count?
No.
There aren't that many people
who kind of go into
project management and construction,
having costed it themselves
and then having not built before,
and, you know, taking the whole
thing on. That is...
that is right out there.
If that weren't extreme enough,
they've got to live in a mobile home
on site until they finish,
which will hopefully be
nine months from now.
In November, they start
decapitating their old house.
Nigel wants it done in a sensitive,
Zen fashion.
He wants to recycle
as much as he can.
Of course, yeah, demolition creates
a huge amount of waste.
By doing it in this softly-softly
way,
we're able to pick apart
and preserve,
and each element we want to keep,
we can at least have control over.
Reusing materials
might also help
with their tight £175,000 budget.
But the British wrecking crew don't
do Japanese minimalist destruction.
Right, we're sort of
deconstructing, basically.
We started off being quite delicate
and wanting to save tiles
and everything,
and in the end, you wonder
whether it's all worth it.
I'm been very delicate
with this one,
because it's going in my basement.
Nigel's keen to keep as many of
the shingle tiles as he can
to re-use as cladding
for a garden pavilion.
That's not working either.
I saved one for you, Nige!
There you go. Put that on the wall.
The thing is, to get them out whole,
or anything like whole,
is so much work,
because they're so well nailed in.
And you can see a lot of them
are split.
My idea was we could just peel them
off one by one, intact.
I realise now there's no way
you could prise off individuals.
So we've had a lot more debris.
We've not done this
kind of thing before.
We dive in, we have a look,
you see where you're going.
Despite his best intentions,
Nigel's saved around
400 out of 4,000 shingles.
His recycling drive to save money
isn't going well.
Two weeks later, it gets worse,
when his plan to recycle the old
building is shot to pieces.
His newly appointed main contractor
has had to tear down the rotten
first floor joists and some
of the walls, leaving only three.
They're being replaced
with sturdier block work
to support the new timber frame.
We've took out all of
the existing floor joists.
They were supposed to have remained,
but now we're putting in
a complete new floor
right through the whole building.
I would rather have seen the project
taken down completely
and then rebuilt in probably
a timber frame structure.
As it stands, the extra work to
replace the joists on walls
will cost Nigel £10,000.
A lot of people have said as we've
been going through the demolition,
you know, it would have been easier
just to knock the whole thing down
and start again from scratch.
Barely a month in, and already it's
going the wrong way - horribly.
And it's not going to get
any easier.
This is the sort of complicated job
that really needs some professional
help, or at the very least,
a comprehensive set of drawings.
When you commission a house to
be built for you,
there's a sort of standard operating
procedure for the design work.
It starts out with some sketches,
discussions, maybe a model,
something loose and vague, out of
which eventually come the planning
drawings, which form the basis
for the detailed drawings.
By the time you've finished, you
have a sheaf of drawings this thick,
98% of which are all about
the junctions and the details,
the meeting of different materials
and the fixings, yeah?
Whereas, Nigel has one drawing,
which was produced for planning,
and, um...
..that's it.
The forests of the Welsh Borders
seem the appropriate place to build
a wooden home, but Nigel and Tamayo
are learning that building a house
is no straightforward
DIY project.
Nigel has never built anything
in his life but,
as a professor of experimental
physics,
he is expert at problem-solving.
And those coefficients
are linked.
While Tamayo is a local
teacher of ikebana,
a sort of minimalist Japanese
flower arranging.
It is very important to have
Japanese elements in our house,
because that reminds us of our time
in Japan.
The most distinctive of those
elements is the timber
they've chosen for the frame -
Japanese larch.
It first came to Britain
in the mid-19th century as part
of a fad for exotic trees,
and it's now grown all over.
It's never really been used
for building houses here until now.
This is a brave
and exciting step into the unknown,
so Nigel and Tamayo are
visiting a local forest
to see their larch being felled by
a Swiss Army knife of a machine.
60 years of growth
and in two minutes it's chopped
up into slices like salami.
It's extraordinary.
The first reason that attracted us
to it was of course the name.
We thought, "Well,
this would be an obvious choice."
But then we delved into it
and realised that actually
it's not an obvious choice, at
least for the timber frame industry.
And for many reasons it has just been
turned into things like pallets
and fencing.
The strength of Japanese larch
varies significantly from tree
to tree.
It also costs three times as much
as imported spruce
because of the difficulties
in milling it.
Nigel has paid ?13,500
upfront for this larch,
which I find staggering,
because he doesn't even know
if it strong enough to use
structurally in his house.
So he is seeking reassurance
from a wood expert.
How brave is Nigel in using it?
We haven't really done enough
strength testing on larch.
It's a brave, risky step to take.
It's much easier to go with
imported spruce,
because everyone knows about that.
But there is a better reason to
use Japanese larch.
There's a lot of it around,
thanks to a disease,
Phytophthora ramorum,
which is tearing through
the Japanese larch population in
Britain.
We've got the biggest larch forest
outside of Russia.
140,000 hectares of larch, we've got.
Good grief! In Britain.
And is it all coming down because of
this disease? Yeah, probably.
This explains why people like
the National Trust
have been felling entire
estates of larch.
Yeah, they're really worried. Yeah.
If this works, Nigel and Tamayo
will make history
and set an example of what to do
with the millions of tonnes
of healthy larch timber currently
being felled preventively.
They will change
our perception of larch.
But before they can use
it in their home,
it needs to be strength
tested at a local sawmill.
First and foremost, we want to have
a structurally sound house.
We've come on site today
to strength-grade the timber
and find out
if it's good enough for the build.
This is quite a critical stage
because we are essentially
going into the unknown a bit.
Wood strength is
measured in its C numbers.
C16 is standard
for structural timber.
Nigel and Tamayo need their
Japanese larch to be at least C24.
It'll be disastrous
if it is not strong enough,
because Nigel has already
spent ?13,500 on it.
They weigh each piece,
test its moisture content
and plug the figures
into a computer.
So 10,000 is around C24.
Shall I get the other end? Yeah.
They keep testing the wood,
only to get the shock of a lifetime.
They've discovered superwood.
This is an extraordinarily strong
piece of timber.
We've got a reading of over
C50 class.
Absolutely delighted
and it's beautiful.
I mean, the smell of it is gorgeous,
the look of it is gorgeous
and I feel a deep sense of relief,
but also wonder, actually, at the
beauty and strength of this wood.
This is ground-breaking news. But
with it comes a bittersweet irony.
They are two months in
and they have to save ?10,000,
thanks to the extra reconstruction
work on the ground floor.
They need to compromise somewhere.
The original idea was to have an
entire timber frame constructed
out of larch, but unfortunately this
is a project also based on budget.
They've decided to use
a mix of Japanese larch
and cheaper spruce, brought all
the way from Scandinavia.
It is strange.
The local source is more expensive
than importing from Scandinavia.
It's just the way at the moment.
All things considered,
we believe it was the right decision.
Take the Japanese larch as far as
we could at this stage
and keep within budget
and on schedule.
It's not a disaster, though.
Nigel will use the spruce
sparingly for the exterior frame,
while using larch for the
internal partitions in the cladding.
The first challenge of today is
getting the timber frame cassettes,
the walls of the house, up and over
the 11,000-volt electric cable.
I must say that the man who is
doing the crane work is amazing.
Yes!
Successfully lifted, the crew wastes
no time putting up the cassettes.
It's a relatively cheap, quick and
simple system.
To make the walls,
they slide the squares into place
and glue and pin them together.
It takes barely three hours to lay
out the first-floor frame
on top of the old house.
It's amazing. From drawing, now
we've got a three-dimensional wall.
It's...
..amazing.
Two weeks later, the timber frame
reaches full height.
It's only now that Tamayo
and Nigel's vision of
Japanese woodland living takes on
its full woody form.
I don't think many of us would
choose to live in a forest,
would we?
They are dark, confusing
and oppressive places, after all.
But I think that's because we tend
to experience them at ground level,
deep within them. Whereas a building
like this can do something magical.
A building like this can lift us
up into the canopy.
For a man who's never
project-managed,
let alone built before,
I'm rather impressed that Nigel
got this up in barely three months,
but ikebana, this isn't. No
precision Japanese workmanship here,
and I'm not surprised,
with no architect to oversee it.
Downstairs, where the timber frame
meets the existing building,
there's been a big cock-up.
The new frame doesn't line up
with the old walls.
So how come they measured that
opening wrong?
This is unusual in the sense that
we've essentially plonked a
timber frame on top of the existing
building,
and the timber frame company took the
dimensions as they were given.
We had the architectural
plans of the house from about 1991,
so about 20 years ago.
So they were utterly inaccurate.
They were utterly inaccurate.
So when it came to be plonked on,
we find that it's 15cm out,
so we had this interesting dogleg
of the double height window,
which would be a complete disaster.
So they are going to build up
the left-hand side of the studwork.
Architects train for seven years
full-time to anticipate this
kind of problem.
Nigel and Tamayo, meanwhile, are
trying to muddle through
with no detailed drawings,
fixing problems as they occur.
Which can be expensive
and laden with compromise.
It's an approach that perplexes
the men who turned up to fit the
high-performance doors and windows
when Nigel's stuck in the lab.
It was overloading, so...
There isn't an architect for the job,
so there's no planning,
there's no details, there's not
really anybody project-managing it.
Nigel is, but he's not here
full-time.
THUNDERCLAP
The heavens opening is a timely
reminder that Nigel is
building a house in one
of the wettest climates in Europe.
It's also a reminder that he's built
the terrace completely flat,
so water won't drain off it.
Fixing the problem is a pain.
They have to build an additional
slope into the floor
and take off all the already
fitted terrace doors.
The window installers have had to on
two or three occasions,
put the window in, take the windows
out, take the pressings out,
adjust the height, put the pressings
back in, put the windows back in.
We are thinking, we buy windows and
they install windows for us.
We prepare box and finish.
It's just so simple, we thought,
but it was simple at all.
Nigel is doing the best he can
without a professional to guide him.
But staggering from problem
to problem is no way to either
build a house or remain calm
and dignified.
Well, there's a bit of slapping
forehead with hand like this.
We've probably had two or
three of these incidents where things
have cropped up and so far I think
the solutions have worked.
There's been nothing irreversible.
But my underlying fear
is that there is going to be
something along the way that is going
to turn out to be...
well, a large calamity.
For experimental physicist
Professor Nigel Hussey,
house building is a quantum leap
beyond anything he's done before.
His approach to construction is
proving as experimental as his work.
He has no detailed drawings
and it's driving
the contractors nuts.
I put my hands up and apologise again
for leading a few
people down a merry path,
but I think the results
on the windows look fantastic.
Nigel wants to thank everyone,
Japanese-style,
so he's throwing a sushi
and sake party.
Thanks a lot.
It's a new and disturbing
experience for the Welsh builders.
The first sushi, yeah.
I don't think I'll having that
wasabi sauce again either.
LAUGHTER
BLEEP. Jesus!
HE COUGHS
Nigel's judgment on the project
hasn't always been the best.
Giving raw fish to Welsh
builders is one of his more
minor mistakes.
But, faithfully following the
original architect's plan to
break up the uniformity
of the cladding is a masterstroke.
Looks wonderful. I can't wait to see
the combination of horizontal
and vertical
stick together.
Japanese larch is very,
very durable,
thanks to its high resin content,
so it doesn't need to be treated to
survive the worst weather that Wales
has to throw at it.
'A week of sawing, fitting and
nailing and the cladding is on.'
So you have now the two boxes.
One with cladding running that way
and running that way
inter-penetrating,
with glazing, all-in.
When the cladding first went on,
it started to look like a sauna,
look like a log cabin. Yes.
Then, when you put the two together,
the horizontal and the vertical,
it becomes architectural
and it's kind of weird
how having those two at right
angles to each other
has taken it away from being that
simple log cabin construction.
So,
it works, yeah?
Yeah, it works.
A big relief, really,
cos this was a key moment in terms of
the architectural look of the build.
It looks great, doesn't it?
But closer inspection reveals
evidence of a ghastly problem.
Nigel hasn't installed anything
to throw rain off the building
above the windows
so water can track under
the cladding
and into the house
around the window frames.
'He's tried to bodge
a remedy for this using silicon.'
I just wish Nigel had
thought about this
detail up here a little bit
more beforehand.
HE SIGHS
I believe in design,
in working things out
with a pencil beforehand, which is
really efficient and really cheap
as opposed to Nigel's method
of using raw materials in situ.
Which is called
"making it up as you go along."
Where is he?
Oh, there you are.
Pretty cladding.
Beautiful cladding.
Yes. Beautiful cladding.
On a day like today, the rain,
when it's running down the face
and hits that junction
between cladding
and window at the top there...
at the moment it's
siliconed in there.
It's all we've got.
That silicon is not going to hold
up... Last the course. Not for ever.
I did look a couple of weeks
ago at another timber-clad building
and I noticed that there was...
A little overthrow. Yeah.
A tiny,
little overthrow would do it,
something popping out at an angle.
The trouble is, at the moment,
it's very tight at the top,
so if we were to put one in,
somehow we'd have to
open that cladding up. So that's
a cladding detail
and that's not resolved for the very
simple reason that...
there were never any drawings.
There were never any
drawings for this type of detail. No.
As had often been the case here,
it's a case of just us
sort of sitting around
for half an hour, thinking about the
different possible solutions.
Silicon is a cheap
and short-term solution outdoors.
After several days' reflection,
to protect his beautiful
Japanese home, Nigel
rightly invests in some overthrows.
These are little
slices of cleverly profiled wood
that are slotted at an angle
above the windows
to throw the water off the building
but it would have been
easier to put them
in before they put
the cladding from.
Doing it retrospective
is very, very difficult.
It's fiddly. It's going to end up
nearly five days' additional works.
Brett's got 25 windows to alter.
He has to cut the slot
for each overthrow by eye
and hold the saw steady to
avoid damaging
the window frame.
SAW WHIRS
Oh, BLEEP.
I caught it with a circular
saw blade.
Missed all the essential parts.
It's all still there.
HE LAUGHS
While Brett's men
plasterboard the inside,
Nigel and Tamayo start
thinking about the Japanese room.
It can't be bodged or made
up on the spot
and, to remind Tamayo of home,
it has to be authentic.
Because we can't just
but this sort of stuff
in the UK, the only chance we do have
is now, is to go to Japan.
Nine hours, nine time zones
and one sleepless night later,
Nigel and Tamayo arrive.
Their first stop is a famous
antiques market
in Kawagoe, two hours outside Tokyo.
It's not long before Nigel finds
a pair of beautifully carved
vintage ranma.
In very good condition. Around ?40
for two, it's amazing.
Basically, these fit above the doors
so they used them for ventilation.
About 60 years old.
What could be a better way to
stave off homesickness
than by incorporating venerable
Japanese objects
into your house?
I think this is a great start.
A very good start.
This is a great start.
Nigel and Tamayo don't want to buy
everything from
the antiques market.
So precious is their Japanese room,
they want to commission their own
elements for it from master
craftsmen.
We came to see fusuma
for our sliding doors
for Japanese room.
Fusuma are wooden rectangular frames
covered with fabric or paper.
They're used as room dividers
or as sliding doors.
Nigel and Tamayo wanted craftsmen
and they've found one.
HE SPEAKS JAPANESE
When he was 15 years old
he started this job,
so for 55 years,
he's doing this job.
The average time people spend
and then train
themselves,
it takes more than ten years.
Shaving thin paper
with this fine precision
is delicate work.
But his speed and confidence make
it seem effortless.
The charm for Nigel and Tamayo
is it will be bespoke to them.
It's not something
we bought off the internet.
And, yes, it will
put you in touch...
That's right. ..With your hometown.
Their last visit
is to a tatami maker.
Tatami are rice-straw mats
covered with woven rush
and they're an essential
part of any Japanese home.
Nigel's spending ?400 on this.
The smell is very special, a unique
smell of the straw.
As a floor material, it's very
forgiving, it's lovely to walk on,
you can lie down on it.
I think without the tatami,
it would be difficult to get
the feel right for that room.
'Back in Britain, in July,
'eight months into Nigel and
Tamayo's nine-month project,
'it's full steam ahead.'
Busy day today.
There are joiners here,
furniture makers,
decorators, plumbers, tilers,
and also Japanese things, as well.
'Like the Japanese-style bath
'that Nigel's ordered from Holland,
'which is being lifted up
to the second floor.'
A bit more.
'It's a free-for-all as everyone
chips in to get it onto the roof
terrace.'
Take it down now.
I'm glad we didn't hire a crane.
Absolutely.
'How magical to have a
wood-fired outdoor bath
'up amongst the trees here.'
This has been the icing on the cake.
In Japan, is this conventional?
Do most people have an
outside hot tub?
No, it's very rare
to have this type of outside...tub
in a private house.
It's a very luxury thing to have.
This is actually the single most
expensive item
in the whole build.
This was just under four grand.
HE GASPS
No expense is being
spared on the Japanese elements.
To install them properly,
Nigel's found
one of the few companies in the UK
who can fit out a Japanese room.
They're installing the sliding
paper doors, or shoji.
The floor here will be covered in
their green straw matting.
Lots of Japanese love to sit on,
also lying on the tatami mat,
like the same as your sofa,
a comfy sofa,
when you arrive to your house.
I'm really looking forward to this.
It's the very low window.
Am I allowed in here
when this is done?
Take your shoes off and come in.
How else do I need to prepare
for the tatami experience?
We've deliberately made the height
of these sliding doors such that
you bow,
that they're lower than our doors,
so you have to...
there's a reverence to the Japanese
room as well, that we
have to essentially... Bow.
We'll be sitting here on two
thrones as you come in...
HE LAUGHS
The Japanese garden will be
through there. Oh, yeah?
Yeah, through the rubble.
The Japanese brick garden(!)
SHE LAUGHS
A modern interpretation
of the Japanese garden.
All you need to do to that is rake
it. It'll look lovely(!)
THEY LAUGH
So, this tatami room...
I had thought it would
provide a spectacle
like the centrefold
from an Interiors magazine,
but I now thing it'll be much
more of an experience
I haven't had before.
That combination of authenticity,
craftsmanship, beauty,
a thousand years of heritage, light
diffused through a paper screen
or spilling through
the slats of a sliding wall.
The smell...
the tea, the sounds of it.
It all offers, doesn't it,
the tantalising temptation of a
tatami tea-time.
Up above the Wye Valley in
the wooded Welsh borders,
Nigel and Tamayo have persisted.
Despite an unconventional approach,
despite their lack of experience and
restricted budget,
they have won.
They have pretty well finished.
That little house in the woods
was so dank and dismal,
now, with any luck,
it's been transformed into a perfect
little magical wooden box.
There it is.
Poking out of the trees.
And, you see, that would sit
well in any forest
anywhere on the planet - in
the Alps, in the Japanese hills...
in the Welsh borders.
This is Nigel and Tamayo's
modest cabin in the woods,
tucked away in the trees.
It is remarkable that they built
it for less than ?200,000.
It's a simple but effective
piece of architecture.
Don't forget
these guys are pioneers,
championing the use of UK-grown
Japanese larch.
The timber is really very good,
crisscrossing the building
and every plank connects this house
to its setting.
Hello. Hello.
Hi, Kevin. Nice to see you.
How are you?
Look at you in your glad rags,
the pair of you.
Your house is looking quite
delightful.
How do you feel about it?
The whole journey and experience
was...
stressful, but...
it's kind of like - "We did it!"
That's good. It surprised you.
It does still stop me in my tracks.
You know, it's...
The visual of it in its setting
still gets me, still grabs me.
You will know this
from experience,
but the amount of effort
required to finish a building
to this level of detail
and to do it well,
and to even finish the blinking
thing, is extraordinary.
I don't know how you've done it.
I know, we all look back and think
how the heck did we do that.
I'm sort of still waiting for
something to go wrong.
Still waiting for the building
to, kind of...
Don't lean against the wall. Oh,
no! Don't lean against the wall!
But the bodgeries of the past
are behind them.
The old poky forester's cottage
interior has been opened up
into airy space -
simple and elegant.
But what makes this in more than
just a modest, pretty house
are the Japanese bits,
which start with Tamayo's
Ikebana display.
That's your work? That's my work.
I think it's just a good balance
with the big sliding doors.
And then on the journey down
the corridor, there is this,
which looks magical.
Can we go in through the...
Round window. Well, yeah.
And the square gate.
How does it slide?
To the right.
Isn't that lovely?
That's exquisite.
Welcome to the tatami room.
It has beautifully crafted paper
sliding screens.
It has hand carved beech frames,
a very low rectangular window,
and the green tatami straw mats.
It is otherworldly, ordered,
and magical.
And it's the last thing you'd
expect to find in rural Wales.
There's no furniture in here -
just three cushions. So you kneel.
You kneel on the cushions, it is
all very low -
obviously, with the low window.
It smells extraordinary.
Like a...field.
The smell of new tatami mats
is something
I do remember from my childhood.
I used to lie down and do roly-poly
and then just...just smell,
enjoy the smell very much.
This must be very nostalgic
for you. Very powerful.
Mm.
It's clearly a hit with Tamayo,
but this room isn't just about
evoking memories of Japan.
It serves a number of practical
purposes too.
You're thinking of having flower
arranging classes in here.
Yeah, I'd love to.
And you've set various lights in here
which can be moved around
so you can have different lighting.
I can imagine nothing more exciting
than learning Ikebana in this room.
This is an incredibly multifunctional
room.
It's a sleeping room -
a guest room for sleeping.
Tea room.
Ikebana classroom.
I think maybe we should all have
a tatami room in our house.
Isn't it remarkable that out
of the chaos of building work
they've wrangled a room
this precise and delicate.
But what have they done with their
piles of brick rubble in the garden?
Oh, they've gone!
Yeah.
They transformed into an
extraordinary miniature landscape
of hills.
It's fantastic!
Isn't it? Mm!
Are you pleased?
Yes, it's like a miniature
of Wye Valley.
Of the Wye Valley.
Also my hometown's Tama valley too.
Ah, OK, yeah, yeah, which is very
steeply sided, isn't it?
I like the little val-deri
wandering path... Well done, Nigel!
..disappearing over the pass
into the next verdant valley.
But it's not all Zen gardens
and straw mats,
the rest of the ground floor is
given over to open plan
Western living.
This is all very generously
organised,
and so different to the dank place
it was thanks to the glazing.
A significant part of this building
is glass.
Windows reflect the forest.
They bring the forest in.
It's a connection that only grows
in intensity, the higher up you go.
The stylish first floor looks right
out onto a wall of variegated green.
The top floor is up in the canopy,
and the privacy this brings
has allowed them to build
a little world of Japanese
indulgence.
This looks entrancing.
This is our attempt
at a Japanese bathhouse.
Two hot rails,
two stools,
and two little bowls and showers.
Two matching showers.
This is really prepare yourself
for the bath. Is that right?
You shower first, to clean yourself.
We do. Such a civilised idea.
If you are going to share a bath
with somebody, get clean first!
In Japan, it is traditional to bathe
naked in the company of others.
In Britain, not so much.
So, I'm being modest,
if that's all right.
For the sake of modesty, we are
all wearing...bathing costumes.
So, sit on here... and then
do your showering.
Everything is just there.
Do you not find it easier to do
this is standing up, Nigel?
Or have you been inducted?
I'd want it up here.
To stand underneath. No?
When you've done your hair,
fill this up...
Watching a grown man shower
on a miniature stool
is all part of the surreal Japanese
experience this house has to offer.
Almost as surreal as sitting
up in the canopy in a wood-fired
Japanese bath.
To rebuild their old home
into this,
to provide such a surreal
experience,
has cost Nigel and Tamayo ?200,000.
25,000 more than they expected.
We're skint. Absolutely skint now.
Er, but...
But you are rich beyond measure,
in other ways. Mm.
Beans on toast now, every day.
Beans on toast.
We started to think, "OK, let's go."
We've got the money, just about
we think, to create vision
the architect's gave us.
Let's go with that,
and see how far we get.
This sounds like a brilliantly
wrought justification
for making it up as you go along.
Well, we don't know any other way.
No.
I don't know if I'd recommend it,
because it comes with its own
stresses,
and points along the road where
you think,
"What have we done?
We haven't thought this through."
Is there a little surprise that
building has thrown at you
which you enjoy?
HE SIGHS
Actually, the biggest surprise
was the rooftop.
The view from there across the trees
is something we never dreamt of.
The biggest thing I like is
something
I couldn't get in this country
before -
having a hot tub, and having
Japanese space in this country.
And feel closer to my family
and friends in Japan.
Bringing Japan to Wales is of course
a supremely romantic gesture,
and for that Nigel and Tamayo
should be applauded.
I have to say I truly thought
they would experience
more trouble on the way - that the
result would be more compromised.
So, how is it, I hear you ask...
How is it possible that a couple
with no experience,
not very much money, and not very
much in the way of drawings,
get to finish such a beautiful,
elegantly detailed building.
Well, I think the answer partly
lies in inheriting
a pre-existing building with a slab
and some walls.
It partly lies in choosing
the cassette build-method,
which allows you to work from
the outside in,
and keep the building watertight.
It lies in selecting a range
of windows
that are pretty standard,
and for that matter, in finishing
the inside of the building
in a straightforward, simple way.
Oh, and then there is "ganbatte" -
the Japanese word for can-do
attitude.
another country, can be a wrench,
especially when
that move is permanent,
when you decide to live there,
so, imagine if you're Japanese,
moving to the UK.
How do you stave off
the homesickness?
Well, I suppose, you could listen to
lots of Japanese music
on a Japanese stereo,
you could get your husband to get
up as a samurai warrior,
or you could build yourself
a permanent, living testament
to your homeland.
Something you can enjoy every day.
You could build yourself
a state-of-the-art Japanese home.
HE SPEAKS JAPANESE
Japan is a land
of intrigue and mystery
that has captured the imagination
of the West for centuries.
It captivated professor of
experimental physics Nigel Hussey,
who met his wife Tamayo
here 16 years ago.
I was working in Tokyo
and I was invited to a party.
I met my friends there,
and just as they opened the door
to the party,
I saw Tamayo there, dancing.
At that moment,
I kind of plotted her downfall!
I'm not sure that's a good way
to describe it!
HE LAUGHS
An hour out of Tokyo
is this small town,
set in a blue plum
and cherry tree forest.
Hey! Konichiwa!
It's here that Tamayo grew up
in a traditional Japanese home,
the style of which she and Nigel
would like to reproduce in Britain.
It's all made of wood and paper.
It's very fragile and very delicate.
So simple, too. Yeah.
That's partly because,
in an earthquake-prone country,
it makes sense to build
with lightweight materials.
Many houses in Japan are only
expected to last 20 years or so,
but still, great pride and care
is taken in making them.
The key elements are
tatami, or straw mats,
fusuma, or sliding doors,
and ornamental room dividers,
or ranma.
THEY SPEAK IN JAPANESE
I think, for a Japanese person,
the integrity of the house
is in the interior,
where they really take a lot of
effort to get the detailing right.
The finishes on the corners,
the clean lines,
everything about the interior,
and it's also the relationship
to the outside,
are what excites us
about Japanese architecture.
When they left Japan 14 years ago,
they decided to live somewhere
that would remind them
of Tamayo's hometown.
And so they moved to Wales.
It was in the Wye Valley
in the Welsh borders that they found
a plot for £375,000.
I say "plot" - it was a house.
A simple, damp dwelling, that they
felt they could improve on for them
and their son.
It was cold, miserable, and
poorly built, with small windows.
How could they not improve on that?
What are your ambitions
for this place?
We're building a very
contemporary house,
but with rather traditional
Japanese elements.
So there's going to be a single room
downstairs with sliding doors,
and on the top floor,
a Japanese bathhouse,
which has an outdoor bath. Wow!
What are you going to do here?
Does this go completely?
I call it a decapitation
of the house.
We're cutting off this big roof and
building upwards into the canopy.
It's not going to look like,
you know,
an adapted brick-built
chalet bungalow?
No, no! Well,
that is not the aspiration here.
Nigel and Tamayo's true ambition
is to bring Japan to Wales
and build a Japanese-influenced
home for their family.
In true samurai fashion,
they're going to behead
their old masonry house,
but keep the first floor
and walls to save some money.
On top of this, they'll build
the house up out of timber panels
in Welsh-grown Japanese larch wood,
adding two storeys.
The whole thing then
gets a wrap of insulation
and more Japanese larch cladding,
transforming it into
a 21st-century woodland home.
Inside, the traditional arrangement
of pokey, small rooms, disappears.
Instead, they'll install
large windows throughout,
and a much more open-plan
arrangement,
with a well-lit kitchen
and dining area facing east.
To one side of the living area,
Nigel and Tamayo
will construct the heart of this
home, a Japanese tatami room
fitted with all the authentic
features that Tamayo will recognise.
Paper sliding doors and straw mats.
On the first floor, there'll be
four bedrooms, one bathroom,
and a small roof deck.
The second floor will be home
to the other big Japanese idea
in the building,
a large roof terrace
fitted with a traditional
outdoor wooden bath, along with
a Japanese shower room and study.
The design is for a wooden,
woodland box of a house,
suited to its setting.
Unlike the house
they've got at the moment.
The brick house doesn't
work in a forest, for me.
I think our design works far
more better with cladding.
We're going to try and use a timber
that's not actually been
used before for a domestic property
in the UK.
Which is? Japanese larch.
Japanese larch is lightweight
and hard-wearing.
It grows in the UK,
but its high silica content
means it blunts saw blades
and it's tricky to mill.
Its poor reputation means
that our construction industry
has forgotten about
larch in Britain.
So Nigel and Tamayo are setting
a brave, experimental example here.
It's not common in this country yet,
to use Japanese larch for timber
frames or cladding, but, why not?
Yeah, yeah. Is it as durable
as European larch is?
Oh, yeah, durability is not an
issue. Strength might be an issue.
And you want to use it
structurally as well?
We're going to use it for both the
timber frame and for the cladding.
So are you doing this
because you miss home,
or because you miss Japan?
Which is it?
Sort of both, maybe. Yes.
So how much is it going to
cost you to do this?
We have a budget, including
everything, of about £175,000.
OK, and who's come up with that?
Is that your architect,
or a quantity surveyor, or..?
That's what I came up with, because
that's what we can afford. OK.
Our architect at the time said,
"You can't do it for that."
Your architect said that? Normally,
they're incredibly optimistic.
We actually had to part company
at the point of, er...
our budgets diverging. Yeah, yeah.
But you're still using
the detailed drawings?
No, well,
we only had the planning drawings.
I can't quite believe
they're taking on a project
this complicated without an
architect.
Not only that, the early costs
for the project were £326,000.
They've got roughly half that.
To save money, they're doing as much
as they can themselves.
We're essentially project managing,
doing the financial management
of this project. OK, yes.
With experience of doing that
before? Is that something you..?
No. No.
I've built kitchen cabinets before.
Does that count?
No.
There aren't that many people
who kind of go into
project management and construction,
having costed it themselves
and then having not built before,
and, you know, taking the whole
thing on. That is...
that is right out there.
If that weren't extreme enough,
they've got to live in a mobile home
on site until they finish,
which will hopefully be
nine months from now.
In November, they start
decapitating their old house.
Nigel wants it done in a sensitive,
Zen fashion.
He wants to recycle
as much as he can.
Of course, yeah, demolition creates
a huge amount of waste.
By doing it in this softly-softly
way,
we're able to pick apart
and preserve,
and each element we want to keep,
we can at least have control over.
Reusing materials
might also help
with their tight £175,000 budget.
But the British wrecking crew don't
do Japanese minimalist destruction.
Right, we're sort of
deconstructing, basically.
We started off being quite delicate
and wanting to save tiles
and everything,
and in the end, you wonder
whether it's all worth it.
I'm been very delicate
with this one,
because it's going in my basement.
Nigel's keen to keep as many of
the shingle tiles as he can
to re-use as cladding
for a garden pavilion.
That's not working either.
I saved one for you, Nige!
There you go. Put that on the wall.
The thing is, to get them out whole,
or anything like whole,
is so much work,
because they're so well nailed in.
And you can see a lot of them
are split.
My idea was we could just peel them
off one by one, intact.
I realise now there's no way
you could prise off individuals.
So we've had a lot more debris.
We've not done this
kind of thing before.
We dive in, we have a look,
you see where you're going.
Despite his best intentions,
Nigel's saved around
400 out of 4,000 shingles.
His recycling drive to save money
isn't going well.
Two weeks later, it gets worse,
when his plan to recycle the old
building is shot to pieces.
His newly appointed main contractor
has had to tear down the rotten
first floor joists and some
of the walls, leaving only three.
They're being replaced
with sturdier block work
to support the new timber frame.
We've took out all of
the existing floor joists.
They were supposed to have remained,
but now we're putting in
a complete new floor
right through the whole building.
I would rather have seen the project
taken down completely
and then rebuilt in probably
a timber frame structure.
As it stands, the extra work to
replace the joists on walls
will cost Nigel £10,000.
A lot of people have said as we've
been going through the demolition,
you know, it would have been easier
just to knock the whole thing down
and start again from scratch.
Barely a month in, and already it's
going the wrong way - horribly.
And it's not going to get
any easier.
This is the sort of complicated job
that really needs some professional
help, or at the very least,
a comprehensive set of drawings.
When you commission a house to
be built for you,
there's a sort of standard operating
procedure for the design work.
It starts out with some sketches,
discussions, maybe a model,
something loose and vague, out of
which eventually come the planning
drawings, which form the basis
for the detailed drawings.
By the time you've finished, you
have a sheaf of drawings this thick,
98% of which are all about
the junctions and the details,
the meeting of different materials
and the fixings, yeah?
Whereas, Nigel has one drawing,
which was produced for planning,
and, um...
..that's it.
The forests of the Welsh Borders
seem the appropriate place to build
a wooden home, but Nigel and Tamayo
are learning that building a house
is no straightforward
DIY project.
Nigel has never built anything
in his life but,
as a professor of experimental
physics,
he is expert at problem-solving.
And those coefficients
are linked.
While Tamayo is a local
teacher of ikebana,
a sort of minimalist Japanese
flower arranging.
It is very important to have
Japanese elements in our house,
because that reminds us of our time
in Japan.
The most distinctive of those
elements is the timber
they've chosen for the frame -
Japanese larch.
It first came to Britain
in the mid-19th century as part
of a fad for exotic trees,
and it's now grown all over.
It's never really been used
for building houses here until now.
This is a brave
and exciting step into the unknown,
so Nigel and Tamayo are
visiting a local forest
to see their larch being felled by
a Swiss Army knife of a machine.
60 years of growth
and in two minutes it's chopped
up into slices like salami.
It's extraordinary.
The first reason that attracted us
to it was of course the name.
We thought, "Well,
this would be an obvious choice."
But then we delved into it
and realised that actually
it's not an obvious choice, at
least for the timber frame industry.
And for many reasons it has just been
turned into things like pallets
and fencing.
The strength of Japanese larch
varies significantly from tree
to tree.
It also costs three times as much
as imported spruce
because of the difficulties
in milling it.
Nigel has paid ?13,500
upfront for this larch,
which I find staggering,
because he doesn't even know
if it strong enough to use
structurally in his house.
So he is seeking reassurance
from a wood expert.
How brave is Nigel in using it?
We haven't really done enough
strength testing on larch.
It's a brave, risky step to take.
It's much easier to go with
imported spruce,
because everyone knows about that.
But there is a better reason to
use Japanese larch.
There's a lot of it around,
thanks to a disease,
Phytophthora ramorum,
which is tearing through
the Japanese larch population in
Britain.
We've got the biggest larch forest
outside of Russia.
140,000 hectares of larch, we've got.
Good grief! In Britain.
And is it all coming down because of
this disease? Yeah, probably.
This explains why people like
the National Trust
have been felling entire
estates of larch.
Yeah, they're really worried. Yeah.
If this works, Nigel and Tamayo
will make history
and set an example of what to do
with the millions of tonnes
of healthy larch timber currently
being felled preventively.
They will change
our perception of larch.
But before they can use
it in their home,
it needs to be strength
tested at a local sawmill.
First and foremost, we want to have
a structurally sound house.
We've come on site today
to strength-grade the timber
and find out
if it's good enough for the build.
This is quite a critical stage
because we are essentially
going into the unknown a bit.
Wood strength is
measured in its C numbers.
C16 is standard
for structural timber.
Nigel and Tamayo need their
Japanese larch to be at least C24.
It'll be disastrous
if it is not strong enough,
because Nigel has already
spent ?13,500 on it.
They weigh each piece,
test its moisture content
and plug the figures
into a computer.
So 10,000 is around C24.
Shall I get the other end? Yeah.
They keep testing the wood,
only to get the shock of a lifetime.
They've discovered superwood.
This is an extraordinarily strong
piece of timber.
We've got a reading of over
C50 class.
Absolutely delighted
and it's beautiful.
I mean, the smell of it is gorgeous,
the look of it is gorgeous
and I feel a deep sense of relief,
but also wonder, actually, at the
beauty and strength of this wood.
This is ground-breaking news. But
with it comes a bittersweet irony.
They are two months in
and they have to save ?10,000,
thanks to the extra reconstruction
work on the ground floor.
They need to compromise somewhere.
The original idea was to have an
entire timber frame constructed
out of larch, but unfortunately this
is a project also based on budget.
They've decided to use
a mix of Japanese larch
and cheaper spruce, brought all
the way from Scandinavia.
It is strange.
The local source is more expensive
than importing from Scandinavia.
It's just the way at the moment.
All things considered,
we believe it was the right decision.
Take the Japanese larch as far as
we could at this stage
and keep within budget
and on schedule.
It's not a disaster, though.
Nigel will use the spruce
sparingly for the exterior frame,
while using larch for the
internal partitions in the cladding.
The first challenge of today is
getting the timber frame cassettes,
the walls of the house, up and over
the 11,000-volt electric cable.
I must say that the man who is
doing the crane work is amazing.
Yes!
Successfully lifted, the crew wastes
no time putting up the cassettes.
It's a relatively cheap, quick and
simple system.
To make the walls,
they slide the squares into place
and glue and pin them together.
It takes barely three hours to lay
out the first-floor frame
on top of the old house.
It's amazing. From drawing, now
we've got a three-dimensional wall.
It's...
..amazing.
Two weeks later, the timber frame
reaches full height.
It's only now that Tamayo
and Nigel's vision of
Japanese woodland living takes on
its full woody form.
I don't think many of us would
choose to live in a forest,
would we?
They are dark, confusing
and oppressive places, after all.
But I think that's because we tend
to experience them at ground level,
deep within them. Whereas a building
like this can do something magical.
A building like this can lift us
up into the canopy.
For a man who's never
project-managed,
let alone built before,
I'm rather impressed that Nigel
got this up in barely three months,
but ikebana, this isn't. No
precision Japanese workmanship here,
and I'm not surprised,
with no architect to oversee it.
Downstairs, where the timber frame
meets the existing building,
there's been a big cock-up.
The new frame doesn't line up
with the old walls.
So how come they measured that
opening wrong?
This is unusual in the sense that
we've essentially plonked a
timber frame on top of the existing
building,
and the timber frame company took the
dimensions as they were given.
We had the architectural
plans of the house from about 1991,
so about 20 years ago.
So they were utterly inaccurate.
They were utterly inaccurate.
So when it came to be plonked on,
we find that it's 15cm out,
so we had this interesting dogleg
of the double height window,
which would be a complete disaster.
So they are going to build up
the left-hand side of the studwork.
Architects train for seven years
full-time to anticipate this
kind of problem.
Nigel and Tamayo, meanwhile, are
trying to muddle through
with no detailed drawings,
fixing problems as they occur.
Which can be expensive
and laden with compromise.
It's an approach that perplexes
the men who turned up to fit the
high-performance doors and windows
when Nigel's stuck in the lab.
It was overloading, so...
There isn't an architect for the job,
so there's no planning,
there's no details, there's not
really anybody project-managing it.
Nigel is, but he's not here
full-time.
THUNDERCLAP
The heavens opening is a timely
reminder that Nigel is
building a house in one
of the wettest climates in Europe.
It's also a reminder that he's built
the terrace completely flat,
so water won't drain off it.
Fixing the problem is a pain.
They have to build an additional
slope into the floor
and take off all the already
fitted terrace doors.
The window installers have had to on
two or three occasions,
put the window in, take the windows
out, take the pressings out,
adjust the height, put the pressings
back in, put the windows back in.
We are thinking, we buy windows and
they install windows for us.
We prepare box and finish.
It's just so simple, we thought,
but it was simple at all.
Nigel is doing the best he can
without a professional to guide him.
But staggering from problem
to problem is no way to either
build a house or remain calm
and dignified.
Well, there's a bit of slapping
forehead with hand like this.
We've probably had two or
three of these incidents where things
have cropped up and so far I think
the solutions have worked.
There's been nothing irreversible.
But my underlying fear
is that there is going to be
something along the way that is going
to turn out to be...
well, a large calamity.
For experimental physicist
Professor Nigel Hussey,
house building is a quantum leap
beyond anything he's done before.
His approach to construction is
proving as experimental as his work.
He has no detailed drawings
and it's driving
the contractors nuts.
I put my hands up and apologise again
for leading a few
people down a merry path,
but I think the results
on the windows look fantastic.
Nigel wants to thank everyone,
Japanese-style,
so he's throwing a sushi
and sake party.
Thanks a lot.
It's a new and disturbing
experience for the Welsh builders.
The first sushi, yeah.
I don't think I'll having that
wasabi sauce again either.
LAUGHTER
BLEEP. Jesus!
HE COUGHS
Nigel's judgment on the project
hasn't always been the best.
Giving raw fish to Welsh
builders is one of his more
minor mistakes.
But, faithfully following the
original architect's plan to
break up the uniformity
of the cladding is a masterstroke.
Looks wonderful. I can't wait to see
the combination of horizontal
and vertical
stick together.
Japanese larch is very,
very durable,
thanks to its high resin content,
so it doesn't need to be treated to
survive the worst weather that Wales
has to throw at it.
'A week of sawing, fitting and
nailing and the cladding is on.'
So you have now the two boxes.
One with cladding running that way
and running that way
inter-penetrating,
with glazing, all-in.
When the cladding first went on,
it started to look like a sauna,
look like a log cabin. Yes.
Then, when you put the two together,
the horizontal and the vertical,
it becomes architectural
and it's kind of weird
how having those two at right
angles to each other
has taken it away from being that
simple log cabin construction.
So,
it works, yeah?
Yeah, it works.
A big relief, really,
cos this was a key moment in terms of
the architectural look of the build.
It looks great, doesn't it?
But closer inspection reveals
evidence of a ghastly problem.
Nigel hasn't installed anything
to throw rain off the building
above the windows
so water can track under
the cladding
and into the house
around the window frames.
'He's tried to bodge
a remedy for this using silicon.'
I just wish Nigel had
thought about this
detail up here a little bit
more beforehand.
HE SIGHS
I believe in design,
in working things out
with a pencil beforehand, which is
really efficient and really cheap
as opposed to Nigel's method
of using raw materials in situ.
Which is called
"making it up as you go along."
Where is he?
Oh, there you are.
Pretty cladding.
Beautiful cladding.
Yes. Beautiful cladding.
On a day like today, the rain,
when it's running down the face
and hits that junction
between cladding
and window at the top there...
at the moment it's
siliconed in there.
It's all we've got.
That silicon is not going to hold
up... Last the course. Not for ever.
I did look a couple of weeks
ago at another timber-clad building
and I noticed that there was...
A little overthrow. Yeah.
A tiny,
little overthrow would do it,
something popping out at an angle.
The trouble is, at the moment,
it's very tight at the top,
so if we were to put one in,
somehow we'd have to
open that cladding up. So that's
a cladding detail
and that's not resolved for the very
simple reason that...
there were never any drawings.
There were never any
drawings for this type of detail. No.
As had often been the case here,
it's a case of just us
sort of sitting around
for half an hour, thinking about the
different possible solutions.
Silicon is a cheap
and short-term solution outdoors.
After several days' reflection,
to protect his beautiful
Japanese home, Nigel
rightly invests in some overthrows.
These are little
slices of cleverly profiled wood
that are slotted at an angle
above the windows
to throw the water off the building
but it would have been
easier to put them
in before they put
the cladding from.
Doing it retrospective
is very, very difficult.
It's fiddly. It's going to end up
nearly five days' additional works.
Brett's got 25 windows to alter.
He has to cut the slot
for each overthrow by eye
and hold the saw steady to
avoid damaging
the window frame.
SAW WHIRS
Oh, BLEEP.
I caught it with a circular
saw blade.
Missed all the essential parts.
It's all still there.
HE LAUGHS
While Brett's men
plasterboard the inside,
Nigel and Tamayo start
thinking about the Japanese room.
It can't be bodged or made
up on the spot
and, to remind Tamayo of home,
it has to be authentic.
Because we can't just
but this sort of stuff
in the UK, the only chance we do have
is now, is to go to Japan.
Nine hours, nine time zones
and one sleepless night later,
Nigel and Tamayo arrive.
Their first stop is a famous
antiques market
in Kawagoe, two hours outside Tokyo.
It's not long before Nigel finds
a pair of beautifully carved
vintage ranma.
In very good condition. Around ?40
for two, it's amazing.
Basically, these fit above the doors
so they used them for ventilation.
About 60 years old.
What could be a better way to
stave off homesickness
than by incorporating venerable
Japanese objects
into your house?
I think this is a great start.
A very good start.
This is a great start.
Nigel and Tamayo don't want to buy
everything from
the antiques market.
So precious is their Japanese room,
they want to commission their own
elements for it from master
craftsmen.
We came to see fusuma
for our sliding doors
for Japanese room.
Fusuma are wooden rectangular frames
covered with fabric or paper.
They're used as room dividers
or as sliding doors.
Nigel and Tamayo wanted craftsmen
and they've found one.
HE SPEAKS JAPANESE
When he was 15 years old
he started this job,
so for 55 years,
he's doing this job.
The average time people spend
and then train
themselves,
it takes more than ten years.
Shaving thin paper
with this fine precision
is delicate work.
But his speed and confidence make
it seem effortless.
The charm for Nigel and Tamayo
is it will be bespoke to them.
It's not something
we bought off the internet.
And, yes, it will
put you in touch...
That's right. ..With your hometown.
Their last visit
is to a tatami maker.
Tatami are rice-straw mats
covered with woven rush
and they're an essential
part of any Japanese home.
Nigel's spending ?400 on this.
The smell is very special, a unique
smell of the straw.
As a floor material, it's very
forgiving, it's lovely to walk on,
you can lie down on it.
I think without the tatami,
it would be difficult to get
the feel right for that room.
'Back in Britain, in July,
'eight months into Nigel and
Tamayo's nine-month project,
'it's full steam ahead.'
Busy day today.
There are joiners here,
furniture makers,
decorators, plumbers, tilers,
and also Japanese things, as well.
'Like the Japanese-style bath
'that Nigel's ordered from Holland,
'which is being lifted up
to the second floor.'
A bit more.
'It's a free-for-all as everyone
chips in to get it onto the roof
terrace.'
Take it down now.
I'm glad we didn't hire a crane.
Absolutely.
'How magical to have a
wood-fired outdoor bath
'up amongst the trees here.'
This has been the icing on the cake.
In Japan, is this conventional?
Do most people have an
outside hot tub?
No, it's very rare
to have this type of outside...tub
in a private house.
It's a very luxury thing to have.
This is actually the single most
expensive item
in the whole build.
This was just under four grand.
HE GASPS
No expense is being
spared on the Japanese elements.
To install them properly,
Nigel's found
one of the few companies in the UK
who can fit out a Japanese room.
They're installing the sliding
paper doors, or shoji.
The floor here will be covered in
their green straw matting.
Lots of Japanese love to sit on,
also lying on the tatami mat,
like the same as your sofa,
a comfy sofa,
when you arrive to your house.
I'm really looking forward to this.
It's the very low window.
Am I allowed in here
when this is done?
Take your shoes off and come in.
How else do I need to prepare
for the tatami experience?
We've deliberately made the height
of these sliding doors such that
you bow,
that they're lower than our doors,
so you have to...
there's a reverence to the Japanese
room as well, that we
have to essentially... Bow.
We'll be sitting here on two
thrones as you come in...
HE LAUGHS
The Japanese garden will be
through there. Oh, yeah?
Yeah, through the rubble.
The Japanese brick garden(!)
SHE LAUGHS
A modern interpretation
of the Japanese garden.
All you need to do to that is rake
it. It'll look lovely(!)
THEY LAUGH
So, this tatami room...
I had thought it would
provide a spectacle
like the centrefold
from an Interiors magazine,
but I now thing it'll be much
more of an experience
I haven't had before.
That combination of authenticity,
craftsmanship, beauty,
a thousand years of heritage, light
diffused through a paper screen
or spilling through
the slats of a sliding wall.
The smell...
the tea, the sounds of it.
It all offers, doesn't it,
the tantalising temptation of a
tatami tea-time.
Up above the Wye Valley in
the wooded Welsh borders,
Nigel and Tamayo have persisted.
Despite an unconventional approach,
despite their lack of experience and
restricted budget,
they have won.
They have pretty well finished.
That little house in the woods
was so dank and dismal,
now, with any luck,
it's been transformed into a perfect
little magical wooden box.
There it is.
Poking out of the trees.
And, you see, that would sit
well in any forest
anywhere on the planet - in
the Alps, in the Japanese hills...
in the Welsh borders.
This is Nigel and Tamayo's
modest cabin in the woods,
tucked away in the trees.
It is remarkable that they built
it for less than ?200,000.
It's a simple but effective
piece of architecture.
Don't forget
these guys are pioneers,
championing the use of UK-grown
Japanese larch.
The timber is really very good,
crisscrossing the building
and every plank connects this house
to its setting.
Hello. Hello.
Hi, Kevin. Nice to see you.
How are you?
Look at you in your glad rags,
the pair of you.
Your house is looking quite
delightful.
How do you feel about it?
The whole journey and experience
was...
stressful, but...
it's kind of like - "We did it!"
That's good. It surprised you.
It does still stop me in my tracks.
You know, it's...
The visual of it in its setting
still gets me, still grabs me.
You will know this
from experience,
but the amount of effort
required to finish a building
to this level of detail
and to do it well,
and to even finish the blinking
thing, is extraordinary.
I don't know how you've done it.
I know, we all look back and think
how the heck did we do that.
I'm sort of still waiting for
something to go wrong.
Still waiting for the building
to, kind of...
Don't lean against the wall. Oh,
no! Don't lean against the wall!
But the bodgeries of the past
are behind them.
The old poky forester's cottage
interior has been opened up
into airy space -
simple and elegant.
But what makes this in more than
just a modest, pretty house
are the Japanese bits,
which start with Tamayo's
Ikebana display.
That's your work? That's my work.
I think it's just a good balance
with the big sliding doors.
And then on the journey down
the corridor, there is this,
which looks magical.
Can we go in through the...
Round window. Well, yeah.
And the square gate.
How does it slide?
To the right.
Isn't that lovely?
That's exquisite.
Welcome to the tatami room.
It has beautifully crafted paper
sliding screens.
It has hand carved beech frames,
a very low rectangular window,
and the green tatami straw mats.
It is otherworldly, ordered,
and magical.
And it's the last thing you'd
expect to find in rural Wales.
There's no furniture in here -
just three cushions. So you kneel.
You kneel on the cushions, it is
all very low -
obviously, with the low window.
It smells extraordinary.
Like a...field.
The smell of new tatami mats
is something
I do remember from my childhood.
I used to lie down and do roly-poly
and then just...just smell,
enjoy the smell very much.
This must be very nostalgic
for you. Very powerful.
Mm.
It's clearly a hit with Tamayo,
but this room isn't just about
evoking memories of Japan.
It serves a number of practical
purposes too.
You're thinking of having flower
arranging classes in here.
Yeah, I'd love to.
And you've set various lights in here
which can be moved around
so you can have different lighting.
I can imagine nothing more exciting
than learning Ikebana in this room.
This is an incredibly multifunctional
room.
It's a sleeping room -
a guest room for sleeping.
Tea room.
Ikebana classroom.
I think maybe we should all have
a tatami room in our house.
Isn't it remarkable that out
of the chaos of building work
they've wrangled a room
this precise and delicate.
But what have they done with their
piles of brick rubble in the garden?
Oh, they've gone!
Yeah.
They transformed into an
extraordinary miniature landscape
of hills.
It's fantastic!
Isn't it? Mm!
Are you pleased?
Yes, it's like a miniature
of Wye Valley.
Of the Wye Valley.
Also my hometown's Tama valley too.
Ah, OK, yeah, yeah, which is very
steeply sided, isn't it?
I like the little val-deri
wandering path... Well done, Nigel!
..disappearing over the pass
into the next verdant valley.
But it's not all Zen gardens
and straw mats,
the rest of the ground floor is
given over to open plan
Western living.
This is all very generously
organised,
and so different to the dank place
it was thanks to the glazing.
A significant part of this building
is glass.
Windows reflect the forest.
They bring the forest in.
It's a connection that only grows
in intensity, the higher up you go.
The stylish first floor looks right
out onto a wall of variegated green.
The top floor is up in the canopy,
and the privacy this brings
has allowed them to build
a little world of Japanese
indulgence.
This looks entrancing.
This is our attempt
at a Japanese bathhouse.
Two hot rails,
two stools,
and two little bowls and showers.
Two matching showers.
This is really prepare yourself
for the bath. Is that right?
You shower first, to clean yourself.
We do. Such a civilised idea.
If you are going to share a bath
with somebody, get clean first!
In Japan, it is traditional to bathe
naked in the company of others.
In Britain, not so much.
So, I'm being modest,
if that's all right.
For the sake of modesty, we are
all wearing...bathing costumes.
So, sit on here... and then
do your showering.
Everything is just there.
Do you not find it easier to do
this is standing up, Nigel?
Or have you been inducted?
I'd want it up here.
To stand underneath. No?
When you've done your hair,
fill this up...
Watching a grown man shower
on a miniature stool
is all part of the surreal Japanese
experience this house has to offer.
Almost as surreal as sitting
up in the canopy in a wood-fired
Japanese bath.
To rebuild their old home
into this,
to provide such a surreal
experience,
has cost Nigel and Tamayo ?200,000.
25,000 more than they expected.
We're skint. Absolutely skint now.
Er, but...
But you are rich beyond measure,
in other ways. Mm.
Beans on toast now, every day.
Beans on toast.
We started to think, "OK, let's go."
We've got the money, just about
we think, to create vision
the architect's gave us.
Let's go with that,
and see how far we get.
This sounds like a brilliantly
wrought justification
for making it up as you go along.
Well, we don't know any other way.
No.
I don't know if I'd recommend it,
because it comes with its own
stresses,
and points along the road where
you think,
"What have we done?
We haven't thought this through."
Is there a little surprise that
building has thrown at you
which you enjoy?
HE SIGHS
Actually, the biggest surprise
was the rooftop.
The view from there across the trees
is something we never dreamt of.
The biggest thing I like is
something
I couldn't get in this country
before -
having a hot tub, and having
Japanese space in this country.
And feel closer to my family
and friends in Japan.
Bringing Japan to Wales is of course
a supremely romantic gesture,
and for that Nigel and Tamayo
should be applauded.
I have to say I truly thought
they would experience
more trouble on the way - that the
result would be more compromised.
So, how is it, I hear you ask...
How is it possible that a couple
with no experience,
not very much money, and not very
much in the way of drawings,
get to finish such a beautiful,
elegantly detailed building.
Well, I think the answer partly
lies in inheriting
a pre-existing building with a slab
and some walls.
It partly lies in choosing
the cassette build-method,
which allows you to work from
the outside in,
and keep the building watertight.
It lies in selecting a range
of windows
that are pretty standard,
and for that matter, in finishing
the inside of the building
in a straightforward, simple way.
Oh, and then there is "ganbatte" -
the Japanese word for can-do
attitude.