Grand Designs: retired couple create a gigantic floating pavilion in a wildlife haven after tragedy strikes

Retired businessman John and his wife Helen, a vet, lived in a beautiful and rambling 17th century manor house near Dunstable with horses, dogs and cats, until she had a stroke and fell into a coma.

When Helen woke she was severely disabled, unable to walk and barely speak.

Their beloved but sprawling home, that sits on many different levels, was no longer liveable so John and Helen, with their son Ollie at the helm, embark on creating a giant floating pavilion in two acres of wildlife friendly garden.

“The stroke changed our lives in an instant and forced us to live separately, says John with him in the house and Helen in the barn where the floors are flat and the doors wide enough for wheelchair access.

“We want to create a new and different life, to design something that suits our current needs and to live a closer life where we are together,” he adds.

Down a nearby but overgrown track is a two-acre plot with a clapped-out bungalow at its centre. With his son Ollie project managing the build, the plan is to create a 460 sq m pavilion with a concrete fascia and glazed walls that slide back connecting the open plan kitchen to the garden with its own self-cleaning pond.

On the vast green roof will sit a cedar-clad office for John and in the basement will be a snug and a wine cellar, as well as a state-of-the-art gym for Helen’s rehabilitation. It will connect to an annex for a live-on-site carer.

The concrete fascia will overhang the glazed panels “laughing in the face of gravity,” according to presenter Kevin McCloud, all hung on a steel frame “so minimal as to be almost invisible.”

Self-taught developer Ollie can usually be found erecting more conventional brick and block houses but he takes on this complex and challenging project with an optimism so clearly inherited from his dad.

At the outset, the pair estimate a build time of 16 months and a budget of £1.3 million (on top of the cost to buy the land which was £850,000) which will mean selling the manor house to fully fund it.

“Is this too high a price for a family who is still reeling from Helen’s stroke,” asks McCloud, who thinks they have made the usual self-builder errors of misjudging both time and cost.

“But I have never met family so optimist and so stoked on hope, despite so many things that could derail their ambitions,” he says. “I have never met a family like them.”

In December 2020 the bungalow is pulled down, the basement dug and Douglas Fir shutters built to lay on top of the exposed internal concrete wall which will run the height of the home. The shutters are designed to imprint a wood grain effect on the concrete but it’s a high risk technique and until they are pulled off there is no telling whether it has worked.

With John’s attention to detail, if the wood causes a honeycomb pattern rather than a grain the team will have to destroy the wall and start again with huge consequences on time and cost.

In fact, as the couple find a buyer for their house so quickly a new time pressure is added to the project and John asks Ollie to speed up the build by several months so they can move in by the autumn.

Three days later the shutters are peeled off the first half of the roof (5m high) to great effect. Now for the second half (another 5m up to the top of the double height space).

This time it looked as if a sponge had been taken to the wet concrete with the likely outcome that the whole process would have to start again. A “concrete doctor” on site, as he was dubbed, painstakingly cleaned and ingrained the pattern by hand and much to everyone’s surprise it worked, saving tens of thousands of pounds. Next the 20 tons of steel frame arrived from Newcastle and everything was underway for the early completion.

John even wheeled Helen onto the muddy building site to get a glimpse of the shell of her future home. “This place can be the key to unlocking a different kind of future for us,” he says, poignantly. However, here the father-son team hit a real stumbling block: the weight of the steel beams forming the fascia causes the roof to sag and the welding on the joints cracks.

While the contractor takes the hit for this and re-engineers the steel, Ollie decides to unconventionally tackle the project out of sequence in order to get his dad and Helen moved in as soon as possible. In the meantime, the couple moved into smaller rental accommodation and said goodbye to their home and many of their possessions that wouldn’t fit in their temporary dwelling.

While the replacement steel work is underway, the £30,000 concrete floor in the kitchen is meticulously polished and the £80,000 wooden kitchen is fitted – while there are still no windows and the elements rage outside risking damage to the interiors. In April 2021 the £145,000 glazed panels are finally fitted but they have missed the all important spring planting season and it takes until September – two years on (not 16 months) from the demolition of the dilapidated bungalow – until they are in.

McCloud visits, pushing his way through the trees on the edge of the plot to glimpse the house with its glazed walls, concrete overhang and flint wall. From the front it is “fortress like” he says. The glass doors slide back with a flushed threshold designed for Helen’s wheelchair out into the garden where there is a bench by the large self-cleaning pond for the vet to enjoy the wildlife around her. The vast kitchen even has a lower worksurface so that she can cook too.

Although John and Helen went £500,000 over budget to achieve this there is a sense that a price cannot be put on what they have done, especially when the camera shows Helen taking tentative steps and she tells McCloud that her health is “good.”“The house is exquisite and beautiful but it reminds me that great architecture is not just to be admired or experienced. It is to be lived in and this property was constructured with faith and hope and love,” he says.

Grand Designs airs on Wednesdays at 9pm on Channel 4.