Grand Designs – Building egos as well as homes
OPINION: Michael Duffy – SMH – February 20, 2012
I have a recurring dream in which the television program Grand Designs becomes
mixed up with Midsomer Murders. A serial killer is taking out all those irritating
couples in their North Face leisure wear, splattering viscera over the bare white
interiors of their concrete brag boxes in the English countryside.
This uncharitable vision stems from my love-hate relationship with Grand Designs,
which cleverly applies the hero’s journey to home building. In a typical program
Kevin McCloud, a natural television presenter, takes us through the journey of a
wealthy couple who overcome adversity to complete their building. He manages to
express telegenic surprise when deadlines are missed and budgets exceeded – as
though this were completely unexpected – and, at the end, blesses the enterprise with
an emotional, if somewhat vague, homily, such as: ”Although it is a very assertive
building, it’s also very subtle and sensitive” and “this brilliant, if unfinished, building
was snatched from the jaws of doom … buildings like this need heroes and heroines.”
The show is watched by a million Australians and its success tells us a lot about the
way we live now.
Most obviously, it is a reminder of how important houses have become. In the 1970s,
the average house could be bought with a big chunk of one person’s income. One of
the unintended consequences of the move of more women into the paid workforce
has been that it now takes a large chunk of two people’s income to buy a home
(although most of the money actually goes into the land). Possibly because the
financing of the home now dominates a couple’s life more than before, we pay more
attention to it and want to make it as big as possible. In the 1970s, this attitude would
have been criticised as materialism, but you don’t hear people talk about materialism
these days. They talk about wide-screen televisions and feature staircases and (to
take a memorable example from Grand Designs) £1000 ($1480) taps.
You are not allowed to say this is boring. The modern motto is: ”I shop, therefore I
am”. Once we got excited when Apple released I Am the Walrus. Now we get excited
when Apple releases another way for us to listen to I Am the Walrus. This is called
progress.
As well as a celebration of materialism and consumerism, Grand Designs is splendid
space porn. The houses are enormous, especially by British standards – the average
home there is about a third the size of its Australian equivalent, because land is very
expensive. Not that money worries most of the show’s builders, who have no trouble
finding pleasant rural settings in the Lake District or Sussex in which to erect their
palaces.
These settings produce one of the show’s great unconscious jokes – and it does have
lot of humour once you can spot it – the solemnity with which the audience is
assured, by everyone on screen, how wonderfully a flat-topped box can complement
a traditional landscape.
The grand designers are the modern bourgeoisie, but lack some of the redeeming
features of their predecessors. Their lives appear to be completely devoted to making
money and spending it. With the exception of the obligatory passing reference to how
they’re doing it all for their children, there is rarely any mention of community or
religion or volunteer activity or what once passed for culture. Most Grand
Designs homes do not have granny flats or gardens you’d want to walk in. Or
bookshelves. Their walls are often bare of images, apart from photographs of the
occupants or something slick that looks like it was bought from IKEA. This helps
explain why the interiors seem more like magazine photographs than places to live.
The program’s name indicates the one area where the owners do feel they
demonstrate soul – design. Although the roles of architects and builders are
acknowledged, it is always the couples’ own taste, ingenuity and effort that are
central. Very special shows are those where one of them – usually the man – has a
fixation about some previously untried material, or – usually the woman – decides to
run the project. A frisson is experienced in lounge rooms around the land if, early in
an episode, McCloud says, ”So, have you ever managed a build before?”
Many of the grand designers tell us that what they’re doing is cutting-edge, even
bold. This is something of a modernist tradition but, in fact, people have been
building white and wood-panelled boxes in the European landscape since the 1930s.
It’s not really that exciting. In fact, a surprising number of the homes in the program,
with their wow-factor entrance halls and acres of bare floor, resemble the sort of
thing you see in upmarket Sydney housing estates and display-home villages. But
McCloud, who lives in a Tudor farmhouse, generally gives them his blessing, which
adds greatly to resale value (“a Grand Designs home” is a cherished label in British
real estate advertisements).
These houses might be expensive, they might be enormous, but surely they are, at
least, green? Words such as ”sustainable” are thrown about on the program, but with
more passion than rigour. Not many of the homes in the 11 series are near public
transport. Often a perfectly good older home on the site is destroyed, along with all
the embodied carbon it contains. The new home, constructed by belching machines
using materials flown in from around the globe, is generally enormous and open
plan, with high ceilings and massive windows on one side. The lighting and heating
bills must be considerable, no matter how much is spent on the triple-glazed gas-
filled windows imported from Scandinavia.
Despite the implausibility of these green claims, I suspect – for I am an optimist –
they indicate a slight trace of remnant guilt about the orgy of consumerist
materialism on display. Here also, in the desire to have its cake and eat it, Grand
Designs is typical of the wider world.