At the beginning of the first episode of the new season of Grand Designs NZ, presenter Tom Webster puffs his way up a steep hill, pauses at the top and delivers a little sermon about building your dream.
“Can we simply pay for a great design and stand back?” he muses. “Or do we need to experience the toil and turmoil of the process in order to imbue your building with notions of pride, personal connection – and sense of achievement?”
The significance of the question becomes clear as he follows Dale and Maria, husband and wife partners in a recruitment consultancy who have done well for themselves – and now want to pay up and come back when their dream house is done.
“I think we’re going to let people who are really good at what they do do what they’re good at,” says Dale. “From our perspective, the less we have to be involved the better.”
But the complex build is on a steep hill on Waiheke Island and their construction window takes in the wettest Auckland winter on record, then the wettest summer. As the real cost of their dream home mounts they can’t help but get involved.
“They’re very successful in business and their choice was to get the best professional they could find and say, right, you give us a house,” Webster says. “That’s a very different approach to some other episodes, where it’s people’s souls being put out in building form.”
Their architectural designer, Dylan Rhynd, appears briefly at the beginning of the programme and isn’t seen again. As the challenges mount it’s hard not to feel that they should have just looked for a $3 million house and moved in. Yet the result, encompassing details that weren’t apparent until the finishing, is breathtaking – even if Dale and Maria still don’t seem entirely comfortable in their extremely expensive house.
By their nature, Grand Designs construction stories are shot over years and Webster readily acknowledges that over that time, while he’s still running his own architecture practice, “I worry and I feel sorry for people. I feel frustrated for people. I feel like I want to say, ‘Look, you should be doing this, you should be doing that.’ And that if those were my clients I would be able to have that input.
“But that’s the format of the show. It’s almost like speed dating: when you build a friendship, that normally takes time and experience. With these guys, I’m straight into their deepest anxieties and their deepest dreams and passions. Of course we talk about how they’re doing in life and you’re into quite a close relationship.”
He does stay in touch and over the summer revisited several of the homes in this season with his family. His favourite, if pressed, is a circular rammed-earth house in Waikanae. “The homeowner was an architectural designer, but it goes beyond that to thinking about what happens in a hundred years, what happens when this house gets demolished, how much can we recycle? It throws into contrast some of what happens in New Zealand construction, although I do think New Zealand construction is coming on in leaps and bounds in the last two or three years in terms of catching up with the rest of the world in terms of the environmental agenda.”
Webster, now three seasons in as presenter, feels he’s learnt a lot about making TV. “You need an awareness in the moment of what will be pertinent somewhere down the line.” And as an architect?
“I’m constantly learning. Whether I apply that to my own practice probably isn’t the point. It’s just fascinating to see the breadth of design and the breadth of people’s ideas.”
Grand Designs NZ, new season starts Sunday April 26, 7.30pm TVNZ1; and on TVNZ+
