Grand Designs

For other uses, see The Grand Design.

"The Wooden Box" redirects here. For the Opeth album, see The Wooden Box (album).

Grand Designs
Created by	Talkback Thames FremantleMedia
Starring	Kevin McCloud
Opening theme	"Grand Designs" by David Lowe
Country of origin	United Kingdom
No. of series	11
No. of episodes	115 (list of episodes)
Production
Running time	1 hour (with advertisement breaks)
Original release
Network	Channel 4
Release	29 April 1999 – present

Grand Designs is a British television series produced by Talkback Thames and broadcast on Channel 4 which features unusual and often elaborate architectural home-building projects.

The programme has been presented by Kevin McCloud since it first aired in April 1999, and 124 episodes have been broadcast in eleven series.

Format

All episodes generally follow a regular format, with small variations depending on the progress of the build. At the beginning of an episode, McCloud meets the clients embarking on the project; he visits the site with them, and discusses the plans for the building. A computer visualisation or computer-aided design view of the intended project is shown. Once ground work commences, he visits the site periodically, following the build progress, noting any changes, hitches or delays; the build frequently runs over budget and completes later than scheduled. McCloud will often do a piece to camera concentrating on any unique materials or features in the house. He visits again once the building is then made watertight, and the first and second fixes have commenced. He makes a final visit to the site in its finished or near-finished state, once the occupants have moved in. A tour of the house is then given; McCloud brings the episode to a close summarising the house, its construction, and his opinions.

If a house is unlikely to be completed before filming finishes, it will often be revisited in a later episode. In more recent series, McCloud revisits past unfinished builds once they have been completed and may stay overnight.

The properties featured in Grand Designs are hugely varied in style and design, from underground homes to converted water towers to buildings constructed in methods of sustainable architecture; the only common factor is that they are all unusual or extravagant.

Episodes and spin-offs

Main article: List of Grand Designs episodes

The first episode of Grand Designs aired on 29 April 1999. Since then over one hundred episodes have been produced and broadcast in ten series. The Grand Designs brand has also grown in this time with a number of spin-off shows also being made:

• Grand Designs Indoors is a lesser known spin-off, with the same format. As the name suggests the series concentrated on the interior transformation of these properties. Only containing six episodes, this series was broadcast in 2001.
• Grand Designs Abroad focused on properties outside the United Kingdom and was broadcast in 2004.
• Grand Designs Trade Secrets was a spin-off broadcast for two seasons immediately after the main Channel 4 show each week for series seven and eight of Grand Designs respectively. Acting as a companion piece, it gave hints and tips about building and showed some "behind the scenes" material from that week's show.
• Grand Designs Live and Grand Designs Live: Today were one-hour daily programmes broadcast for nine days during the Grand Designs Live 2008 event in London.
• Grand Designs Australia premiered on 21 October 2010 in Australia on The LifeStyle Channel.

DVDs

The original Grand Designs series has been released on DVD in the United Kingdom, however the DVD series numbers do not match the television series as some houses are excluded, and the DVDs do not include "revisited" episodes, where there is only a few minutes of new footage. Instead, the new footage from these episodes is included as an extra on the older DVDs.

• Grand Designs: The Complete Series 1 (two-disc set, released 2 September 2009)
• Grand Designs: The Complete Series 2 (two-disc set, released 30 September 2009)
• Grand Designs: The Complete Series 3 (two-disc set, released 5 November 2009)
• Grand Designs: Series 4 (two-disc set, released 19 March 2009)
• Grand Designs: Series 5 (five-disc set, released 6 August 2009, corresponds to TV series 7)
• Grand Designs: Series 6 (two-disc set, released 1 April 2010, corresponds to TV series 8)
• Grand Designs: Series 7 (two-disc set, released 7 August 2010, corresponds to TV series 9)
• Grand Designs: Series 8 (two-disc set, released 5 September 2011, corresponds to TV series 10)

The Australian release of the original Grand Designs series differs from the UK releases, in that they do not include any "revisited" footage at all. Also the Series 5 five-disc set, includes episodes from TV series 5, 6 and 7.

• Grand Designs Australia: Series 1 (three-disc set, released 4 August 2011, corresponds to TV series 1)

Exhibition

Exhibitions take place annually in London and Birmingham. The exhibitions showcase contemporary design and technology for the home and garden, along with hundreds of stands for suppliers and manufacturers to promote their goods and services. The nine-day Grand Designs Live 2008 event, held at London's ExCeL, attracted over 100,000 visitors. To accompany the event Channel 4 broadcast two live daily programmes directly from the show, Grand Designs Live: Today and Grand Designs Live.

Grand Designs Australia Live launched in Sydney in October 2011 and will in Melbourne in September 2012.

International broadcasts

Grand Designs is also broadcast in Australia (on The LifeStyle Channel and ABC1), New Zealand (on TV3), Canada (on Viva), the Netherlands (on Discovery Channel and SBS 6 as De Grote Verbouwing), Germany (on DMAX as "Große Träume, Große Häuser"), South Africa (on BBC Lifestyle), Denmark (on TV3 Puls), India (on BBC Entertainment), Norway (on FEM), Sweden (on Kanal 9), Finland (on MTV3 and AVA) and Romania (on TLC).

See also

• British property bubble

External links

• Grand Designs at Channel4.com
• Grand Designs Live
• Grand Designs Magazine
• Grand Designs Australia Official Website