Grand Designs Prefabricated German House

The Grand Designs TV couple who went a staggering £1m over budget (...but now they're doing it all again)

Viewers of TV's Grand Designs may remember an episode featuring Tiffany Wood and husband Jonny who had ambitions to build a top-of-the-range German pre-fabricated home in Bath but spent most of the show staring into an increasingly soggy hole in the ground.

Presenter Kevin McCloud described the drilling and piling as the most expensive groundworks he had ever featured in the programme – and that was just the £300,000 estimate, before things went wrong.

First, the construction team found an underground stream, then the neighbour's wall fell down bringing 80 tons of soil with it.

Curvaceous: Tiffany and Johnny Wood's Baufritz house had a budget that spiralled out of control

Rewatching the 2008 episode today it comes across as a period piece from an age when money was plentiful and over-reaching construction projects were everywhere.

For all the problems with their plot – originally the back garden of the house which overlooks the back of their home – by the end of the show the couple had a five-bedroom, 4,000 sq ft home built by German manufacturer Baufritz.

Cecil House is airy, with plenty of curves and colours, overlooking National Trust woodlands on Bathwick Hill. It is solidly built and fantastically well insulated and ventilated, and feels like a home rather than a minimalist glass mansion.

While architecturally everything is light and open, the finances are more subterranean. In the programme, Tiffany repeatedly sidesteps the question of how much was spent on the build. But she does let slip to me that the final cost, including the £325,000 for the plot, was 'about the same as what we are selling it for'.

Given that their asking price is £2.25million, that suggests a serious cost overrun on the estimated £1 million budget.

Still smiling: The Woods are having to sell their dream house and will build a smaller version

The unforeseen bills for sorting out the ground are the reason Cecil House is now for sale so soon after being finished and why Tiffany and Jonny, both 46, and their children Holly, 18, Rosa, 15, and George, ten, won't be spending 20 years in the property as they had planned. 'We were naive,' says Tiffany.

'We realised early on we weren't going to be able to afford to stay here, so we want to sell and do the same again, but on a smaller scale – and a flatter plot.'

Cecil House first went on the market for £2.85million, soon after it featured on Grand Designs.

The Woods took it off, however, when the building plot they were hoping to buy was sold. They tried again, last autumn, at £2.15million.

Tiffany says they found a buyer but he later pulled out. 'We're looking for someone who appreciates the quality,' she says, showing me the impressively engineered sliding doors to the living room. 'That will probably be an international buyer or someone moving from London.'

In contrast to the groundworks, the construction of the house itself went well. The structure was put up in five days using components manufactured in Baufritz's factory near Munich and involving a team brought in from Germany.

There is a snag, though, to building with large prefabricated panels: it involves a very large crane. Tiffany and Jonny had to apply to close Bathwick Hill for three days and make a grovelling apology on the local community website.

As with all German prefabricated houses, Baufritz houses are fantastically well insulated. 'The gas boiler and the underfloor heating were a waste of money,' says Tiffany. 'We have never switched it on, not even in December. The house is heated mostly by body heat.'

Well, that and the very greedy and un-German gas-fired Aga which sits in the kitchen. 'Baufritz didn't really want to put that in,' says Tiffany.

In contrast to some modern British homes which are so airtight that, as Tiffany puts it, 'you wake up in the morning with your tongue all dry', Cecil House has a powered ventilation system which extracts heat and warms the incoming air. Baufritz also boasts that its homes protect occupants from what it calls 'electrosmog'. This has a serious implication for anyone wanting to work from home: Tiffany says her mobile phone will work only if placed right next to the window.

The pair's challenge now is to find a buyer who shares their distinct taste. Baufritz houses are not kit houses as such – there is no catalogue with standardised designs.

Much of the interior, and the general form of the house, is Tiffany's work. Jonny, a GP who says he gets 'three days off every year', insists he had virtually no input.

Personal touches: The airy entrance hall has huge doors and windows

The project has persuaded Tiffany, a former TV producer who moved into interior design, to sign up for an architecture course.

By the time I leave, Tiffany's next project has gone from being 'smaller' to 'well, slightly smaller'.

One thing she won't be doing, however, is moving into one of Bath's classic crescents.

'The irony is that I always wanted to live in Bath, but I don't like Georgian houses,' she says. 'They are very elegant, but too tall and thin and people tend to live on one floor.'

But Georgian builders did know something that Tiffany has only discovered the hard way. If you build narrow and thin it reduces the cost of the ground works.

Local groundworks contractors must be licking their lips in anticipation of another commission.

Winkworth, 01225 829000

Grand Designs Prefabricated German House

Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/property/article-1380355/Our-grand-design-went-1m-budget---doing-again.html

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