Grand Designs…..

Wow. Seriously impressive stuff.

D’ya need a garden if you’re gay, possibly never going to have kids and have that view?

At last, a proper grand design…

Easily my fave episode/house ever.

I still have a soft spot for Francis and Peel Castle; he took on English Heritage and won saving a fabulous building in the process

Linky if you missed it

D’ya need a garden if you’re gay,

Yes, but only if it’s uphill. Great building.

That was stunning!

Funny but I was going to start a ‘what’s your favourite grand designs project’ thread and the Peel Tower easy does it for me. Tonight’s project was unfathomable but it was still a vanity project.

Don’t really like it. Admire the ambition and drive but the guy’s a tool with little sense of design or taste. He seems to have built a soulless 4 bedroom modern hotel with shocking decor. Only saving grace is that view and even then I’m with Kevin – “but it’s in London”.

Well its definitely grand!

My mind can’t contemplate the enormity of the project though. Things like the 6 storey lift shaft, the huge sliding glass front on the cube, even just furnishing & decorating the place just is just mind boggling. I meant they must have spent hundreds of thou on just fixtures & fittings.

How on earth they’ll repay the debt before the end of their days is beyond me too. Unless they plan to live there for 15/20 years or so then sell for a huge profit.

Awesome….just awesome.

They were going to have a garden but due to the plot it would be one of them expensive vertical ones and they didn’t want all the up hill gardening jokes 😐

Might ride past tomorrow and have a gander

I wouldn’t particularly want to live there, but a very impressive build. Fair play to them.

impressive, eccentric, but just a souless impractical vanity project.
why have massive sliding doors to look out at some unsightly yard and wall in Lambeth. too disconnected – I reckon you’d end up living in just one part of the ‘house’, probably the cube thing. the lift is kind of pointless as you still have to use a load of stairs as well. 6 bathrooms?
I can ride up the hill near me and get a better view of London and it doesn’t cost £2m.
I hope the pigeons reclaim it.

I suspect there isn’t much of his buy-to-let portfolio left after that. Massive views, but not very practical to live in. Great to see someone bring in a building on time, and adding more builders when needed instead of stringing a project out.

Yes but you don’t own the hill. It’s their place, their view, their legacy.

One of the him’s is a property developer. Can you think of a better advert for a property for sale in the near future ?

Impressive but impractical building in a pretty ropey bit of london, although it is moving up in the world.

do we need to have a whip round to pay the ransom?

Nah – I’ll escape by Sunday, but thanks. I’m in this….

but the weather isn’t that good right now!

You couldn’t exactly wander around with no clothes on could you ?
Or are they magic windows?

Like him or loath him same with the building that is all personal taste, what is not in doubt is a wonderful building restored very well. Personally I loved it.

I would have loved to have seen a lot more of the conservation work and of the build in progress; this one could easily have filled another half hour. Incredible conversion although, like others have said, totally impractical as a home.

Good investment though. Got to be worth several million.

Good investment though. Got to be worth several million.

Not convinced, who is the market?

Recorded it, not watched it yet, went to see Looper. Really looking forward to it now, having read the comments.

Good investment though. Got to be worth several million.

Not convinced, who is the market?

In (relatively central) London, and as unique as that, with that kind of view, there would definitely be a market. Nice, but totally bog-standard 3 or 4 bed Georgian terraced town houses 500 metres from that building sell for £1.2 million. There are enough people with £3-£4 millon to spend who either live in London or want to own a house in London that it wouldn’t be a problem to sell it. A lot of rich people like flashy, particularly it seems Middle-Eastern, Asian and Russian rich people, and there are a lot of those in and around London at the moment. I’d imagine if you just had the room at the top and a kitchen underneath there’d be at least 10 people interested in buying it for £3 or 4 million just for showing off, entertaining or meetings.

Didn’t Nick Ross’s house in a fashionable bit of London sell for 30+ million?

That place would make at least 10 million I should think, maybe more as just south of the river is becoming more fashionable?

“Darling! Just look at the view!”

*ding dong*

“Ah balls.”

Remember the game when you were a kid and you rang the bell and ran away… 😆

You’d have to be even fitter than a STW cycling warrior to live there with all those stairs.

Chap door run is what we, rather unimaginatively called that game. Hoewever, I think, though I never saw them fitting it (and they came out into the street to greet Mr McLoud at the end), that they’d have taken the trouble of fitting a video intercom in that building. You get them in bog-standard new-build flats nowadays, so I’d think if they were spunking £35000 a week on this(note – that figure is not including the owner’s undoubtedly massive weekly cocaine bill) they’d install an intercom on each level.

It was an inspiring project. With a fabulous building at the end. I wouldn’t like to live in it or where it was located but it was a Grand Design. Crazy money (I had a friend that leant me £0.5M to keep going!) in all ways.

What will it be worth. Well £3-4M easily. When you see some of the fairly ordinary properties here (North Downs) that make £1-2M, then £3-4M is no bid ask for that market.

How the hell do you clean those windows??

Self cleaning glass.

What I didn’t get was he kept referring to it as his and not ‘ours’. I couldn’t work out if they both owned it or it was just the attention seekers?

impressive phallus.

impressive phallus.

Thats what I thought. I wouldn’t mind the scrotum part overlooking some rolling hills, mind you.

You couldn’t exactly wander around with no clothes on could you

Given what a showman he appeared to be, I don’t think he’d think twice about standing at the double height windows naked, scratching his marble bag.

And as for value – I am sure some simple redesigning of the interior access and he could make it into apartments – the top floors, with that view, would command £3-4k a week surely?

What I didn’t get was he kept referring to it as his and not ‘ours’. I couldn’t work out if they both owned it or it was just the attention seekers?

Sky info billed them as ‘a couple’, which they clearly were but it didn’t look like a very equal relationship. He, the developer, came across as very narcissistic and needy of attention. His partner came across as being very much the balancing force in his life.

I can imagine that without him, the developer chap would easily slip into self destruct or depression or something.

What I was surprised at was how someone like him had managed to tame his incredible energy and total lack of focus and planning (he looked to be ‘P’ on the Myers Briggs – someone who got things done in a haphazard way without a lot of careful planning and control) and turn it into such a successful property development business. He obviously had a strong creative eye, but man he was all over the place!

I think I’m going to transfer to ‘Amazing Spaces’

I’d be more inspired by something I can afford

He, the developer, came across as very narcissistic and needy of attention

He did remind me a bit of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.

I imagine he will make his money back but I can’t see the massive profits because my limited experience of high rollers is not many of them want to live in Kennington/E&C despite it being very central. They prefer Knightsbridge. Historically it is a place MPs live and people wanting to live centrally with modest means.

Locally you can buy beautiful Georgian Terrace houses for £1.5 million, not so much of a statement, but considerably cheaper per sq foot, have a garden and are not in the middle of modern development of flats but a lovely garden square. Just think the market is smaller than envisaged, the high end is very location specific and at present i don’t think this is such an area. May change over the next 10 years as they redevelop E&C.

That said, there is another statement home on the market in the area for £4.5 million, which equates to just less than £1,000 per sq ft if they achieve it. Not sure what the square footage of that house is.

Just me, or could the guy last night make a few quid playing a Lionel Messi lookylikey?

It had a roof garden on top of the cube bit didn’t it?

Program seemed so rushed.. That build needed a couple of hours.