Architect Tom Webster says his first season as the new frontman of Grand Designs New Zealand taught him something useful about being a television presenter.
“What I learned the most is to talk less and listen more,” he says with a laugh, on the phone from an Auckland Airport departure lounge where he’s about to catch a flight to a project that will feature in a future season.
Yes, it was a bit scary being a telly newbie and taking over from Chris Moller, who had fronted six seasons of the series. But the ratings were healthy, and TVNZ was happy, he says, and if viewers didn’t like him, he didn’t hear about it.
The original UK show is as much about Kevin McCloud’s ponderings as is it about design but GDNZ isn’t as presenter-driven. The builds and the builders and their occasionally eye-watering budgets are the stars.
“Particularly through the Covid years – and that’s difficult enough to live through in a normal workplace – but if you’re building as well … most people are spending more money than they wanted to, and they’ve had more stress through the process than you typically would like.
“So, our approach is that we celebrate the effort and share some of those problems but ultimately, this is a great thing that they’re doing. I leave the architectural critic side of things for the architecture journals. Even Kevin McCloud has softened hugely with time.”
The series starts with a Perth-based successful business-owning couple building a holiday home on a sloping section above Ligar Bay near Golden Bay. Another episode has six couples, led by another Australia-based expatriate, building a joint holiday home on what the show’s publicity says is “a vertiginous hillside” above Queenstown.
Those builds sound quite, well, aspirational.
“I don’t think we can criticise them for spending that money on a house and, as an architect, I think putting money into good architecture is something akin to the arts, isn’t it? Can you justify building an opera house for $20 million when it tends to be the elite who are going to see it?
“I do have this struggle with architecture in general and particularly homebuilding, that quite often you’re producing a luxury product for somebody who has a lot of money. Is that a worthwhile way to spend your life? For me, it boils down to, well, yes. This is human hope for betterment, and engaging that side of human nature.
“But I really enjoy the [show’s] relatable projects – the ones that you and I and Joe Bloggs could potentially afford to do. Because they are all-in moneywise, the stakes are much higher.”
As a possible carbon offset to those trans-Tasman commuter builds, there is also an off-grid, rammed-earth mountain home near Geraldine in South Canterbury. Elsewhere, the show has episodes with builds on or near the dunes of Brighton in Christchurch and Mangawhai in Northland.
Yes, the presenter may reference a certain architectural parable in the Gospel of Matthew on those last two. “But you’re better building there than in a clay pit or a marsh or on the side of a cliff, as people found out very recently.
“I think the challenge there is getting a building that’s appropriate for that environment. The sand dunes and the seascape are natural and beautiful and wild and so how do you impose a piece of architecture on those environments? That’s the question.”
Grand Designs New Zealand is available to watch on TVNZ 1, from Tuesday, October 24, 7.30pm, and TVNZ+.
