Grand Designs viewers branded last night’s property the ‘worst in the show’s history’ as Kevin McCloud’s show returned for a new season.
The host laid the groundwork for what was billed as one of the series’ most ambitious homes yet.
However, viewers were less than impressed by the final reveal – especially considering the long build time and its eyewatering £465,000 cost.
‘Most of the time houses on Grand Designs look decent once finished … this isn’t one of those times,’ one person wrote on X/Twitter.
Wednesday’s episode showcased architect Howard and his interior designer wife Sarah, who collaborate on a project to construct an unconventional floating home on a tidal estuary near Worthing.
Despite facing numerous challenges and setbacks, the determined couple persevered over a demanding three-year period and finally saw their vision come to life in the completion of the floating home.
What made the project especially difficult was that the house needed to be able to weather high tides, followed by hours of it sitting in the mud.
At the outset, the project appeared daunting with a limited budget of £385,000 spread over an initially estimated 18-month timeline. Howard and Sarah made the ambitious decision to undertake a significant portion of the construction work themselves, further complicating the already challenging endeavor.
‘The mud’s incredibly difficult to work on, so we’re looking at a new way of building, which is going to involve a lot of prefabrication, so we can avoid the basics of manual work on the mud,’ Howard summarised the biggest challenge of their audacious experiment.
Foreshadowing the future, Sarah added: ‘Actually going through this process is going to be really hard.’
The toll that their ‘incredibly difficult’ project had taken on both Sarah and Howard was evident, as they finally welcomed Kevin for a tour of their boat home that looked like something out of a sci-fi movie.
Having dedicated their lives – and entire savings – to bringing Howard’s vision to life, the couple appeared to have been pushed to their limits several times during the three-year period it took for the house to be completed.
Sarah appeared close to tears as she looked around her new house and told Kevin, ‘We’ve both given everything to this for three years.’
Kevin replied: ‘Which, if all it’s done has driven a wedge between you as individuals, damaged the emotional relationship, created tensions, and stress, then it ain’t worth it.
‘If, on the other hand, you emerge from this triumphant, stronger, better…’
To which Sarah said: ‘That feeling where you’re working towards a common goal is intoxicating.’
Some of the salient features of the property – which Kevin compared to ‘Darth Vader’s boathouse’ – a hallway lined with tiger bamboo, a home-welded aluminium staircase, a triangular rooflight ‘from a Star Wars episode’ and a modern kitchen.
The dining area offers views of beach huts and the sea, as Howard told Kevin: ‘It’s about how you extract the maximum joy out of any particular location.’
Audiences at home, however, were underwhelmed by the Grand Designs season premiere – and the final reveal of Sarah and Howard’s ‘depressing’ floating home.
‘I thought I was being mean thinking it was awful, I obvs wasn’t the only one,’ a tweet read.
‘Well just watched new grand designs that is the biggest pile s**t in the shows history,’ said another.
Another person said: ‘Hate it. Won’t be edgy for much longer with a half million warehouse plaything. Looks like a vulture.’
A third fan noted: ‘There are literally no positive comments on this week’s Grand Designs episode.’
A fourth tweet read: ‘What on earth, why make it so ugly, it already lives in mud. Depressing.’
Another user suggested the ‘sound guy probably had a nightmare filming that’ while criticising the ‘hideous looking and incredibly impractical’ structure.
‘Lesson about GrandDesigns, if the dream project goes over any longer than a year maybe year and half at most, you should have a rethink as the dream project sours and becomes a burden rather than a dream, three years in on this one,’ one person wrote.
Still others were confused by Howard’s ‘ever-changing hair-do’, with one X user writing: ‘By my reckoning, Howard had had six different hairstyles since this project started.’
Tonight’s episode was marked by multiple obstacles that Sarah and Howard raced against the clock to overcome.
Designed to look like a boat, and nestled within an idiosyncratic houseboat community, underneath the steel structure that would become their home was a very surprising material – an enormous and prefabricated polystyrene slab.
In February 2023, almost a full year into the project, Howard and Sarah began fabricating 16 polystyrene floats at a workshop in Sussex, using 200 square metres of the material.
Sticking it together with 400 litres of polyurethane glue, activated by spraying it with water, the race was on to join the blocks of polystyrene together.
However, they soon hit a hurdle when Howard realised that one of the blocks had been cut inaccurately – meaning that the project was off to a rocky start.
The couple had already experienced a delay to the building process, as they firstly had to remove a derelict World War Two landing craft on their landing plot, which they’d purchased for £255,000.
This alone took double the amount of time planned – while attempting to permanently moor the building site at the last minute added a further five months.
‘Our perfect project is unimaginably difficult and everyone else looks at it and thinks it’s impossible,’ Howard admitted.
‘We need that combination of difficult and marvellous.’
Host Kevin meanwhile, admitted he thought the couple had ‘bitten off more than they can chew’.
In June 2023, when Howard and Sarah had hoped to be living in their new home, they’d only just taken the first floats and steel beams onto the site.
And it wasn’t until three years after the project began, in February 2025, that Kevin was able to visit Howard and Sarah to see if they’d managed to achieve their dream.
