Kevin McCloud on the advice he gave owner of Grand Designs' 'saddest' home

The owner of the Grand Designs home dubbed 'the saddest house in the UK' had a tragic time dealing with the property

The home that was once labelled as the "saddest house" on Grand Designs still lingers in the memory of the show's presenter, Kevin McCloud.

The grand West Country mansion, which had its moment of fame on the popular Channel 4 programme and was designed to echo a lighthouse, left viewers with a sense of melancholy during its 2019 feature. The episode revealed homeowner Edward Short's struggle through numerous challenges, including the breakdown of his marriage and the accumulation of an eye-watering £7million debt in his quest to transform Chesil Cliff House in Devon.

In an exclusive chat with the Mirror, Kevin shared that he had cautioned Edward about the needlessness of his ambitious project. He recalled advising him: "My initial thoughts was they had a perfectly good house sitting on the site that they could have remodelled, and that would have sorted them out. I said that on the first day. I said 'you've got a perfectly good house here. Why are you going to knock it down? '".

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Reflecting on the episode that introduced the project to audiences, Kevin remarked: "What's really interesting is that everybody remembers the original film because it got a lot of publicity. And it was a film about overreaching, overextending, hubris, marriage breaking down, somebody trying to build something that's too ambitious. And I was absolutely on the same page at the time, and the last piece to camera I made about word hubris, about this idea of trying too hard, you know, and being too aggressive about it."

The subject of the film, Ed, was praised for his openness regarding the challenges he faced. Reflecting on the experience, the speaker noted: "And Ed, who the film was about, really, was wonderful, because he understood that and he wasn't trying to hide it. When we went back to the revisit a couple of years later, he was a sort of changed man. He had sort of gone through this process of reconciliation with the project and and with Hazel, his ex wife, and so the second programme became not about hubris, but about reconciliation and about reconciling yourself with who you are and self knowledge. And it was a beautiful ending, albeit with the same tinge of regret and sadness, but a much more complex film.", reports the Mirror.

The fantastical lighthouse-style home took over a decade to complete and was a financial black hole for Edward, who tragically never managed to reside there.

The music producer's initial ambition to wrap up the project in 18 months proved wildly optimistic as the sprawling venture led to the collapse of his marriage under its crushing demands.

Kevin shared that he maintains contact with Ed after their collaboration and noted this is common with longer-term projects. He said: "They come back to Grand Designs Live. Yeah, I keep in touch with, with, with everybody, through the sort of conventional channels, but one or two people, I sort of see socially. Ed and Rowena, another head, who live on the Hill in Herefordshire, in that great, big, giant Hobbit house. They've become firm friends. And that's partly because we filmed them over 15 years. Ed in Chesil House, I think, it must be about the same. It must be 15, if not 16 years as well. So inevitably you become friendly over that amount of time."

Speaking ahead of the Grand Designs Live show in Birmingham, which ran from 2-6 October, Kevin revealed he buried a time capsule at the event containing cherished keepsakes from the past quarter-century of the show. Despite still having a bucket list for filming, the time capsule, crafted from an old builder's toolbox, holds dear memories including a mug made by a participant's daughter and a prototype of a property that thrilled him on the show.

He expressed: "It's a combination of nostalgia over that last 25 years. And also, you know, innovative products. It's a little bit kind of, we call it jamboree."