Grand Designs UK: Builders sacked on $2m underground ‘hobbit’ house build

REVIEW: Let’s get this out of the way right at the start – I am not a fan of below-ground houses. Hobbit homes may be cute on film, but to bury your outdoor living area as well as your house seems, well, mad.

At the start of this Grand Designs UK show, the couple, Dorran and Vereuschka proudly show off a view of Canterbury Cathedral between the trees. It’s beautiful, but they’re not going to see it because they will be hobbits.

Their house, in Kent, has to be “buried” to preserve the profile of a protected Iron Age hill fort. They even have to bury their cars, which means they’ll need a hugely expensive car lift. Surely, they could have found somewhere else to build?

Dorran is the skipper of a North Sea wind turbine, and spends five weeks at sea, then five weeks at home. Vereuschka meanwhile, looks after the three children and holds down her own full-time job.

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They are building a “stylish and discreet” house designed by architect Richard Hawkes – a plan that came with the land they bought (1.09 ha). It will be buried 4m under the ground, which involves the excavation of 3000m³ of sand that was originally fill supplied to the former quarry on site. They are building on/in sand, in other words.

It’s a massive project. Once the sand is removed, there’s a 450m² hole that requires huge amounts of waterproofed concrete to be poured for the foundations. Concrete will also be poured on site for the walls, and there will be pre-cast concrete slabs for the roof. So not exactly eco-friendly, not that they make that claim.

There will be stepped courtyards inside the hole, and the only “lookout” to the real world will be a single giant window in the living room at one end – a curved facade that has led UK viewers to call it the “Teletubbies” house.

It looks expensive and it is: “I don’t think it will be south of a million quid (NZ$1.98m),” Dorran says of the build.

But it’s not long before there’s trouble. It takes six weeks to find a crew to pour the walls, and costs are increasing. Dorran doesn’t like watching and feeling that he’s not in control – he wants to be in there doing it himself.

Workers have gone

Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud turns up nine months into the build, when the couple thought they might be finished, and finds just a shell of a house with no roof.

Work has stopped, because Dorran has sacked the builders: “We’ve finished with the builders,” he says. “They’ve had their time, shall we say. And they haven’t delivered what we were expecting. We were not particularly impressed with what we were seeing. The extra costs we sort of swallowed as we moved along, but then we got to the point where we couldn’t just carry on like that. So we had to pull the plug.”

The couple has already paid £400,000. Dorran says he will project manage it himself, and even get on the tools. The problem is he is away half the time.

And then there’s the first taste of disaster. The huge waterproof membrane installed by the first team has begun to bubble badly. So he has it all removed, but it’s a very slow, expensive process (11 months). The contractor says installation wasn’t the problem – Dorran halted the build, and it was left exposed to sunlight too long and deteriorated.

The installer says he has never seen that amount of homeowner interference in a build. “He had almost a perfectionist dream of how a build would take place.” We have seen this before on Grand Designs NZ – builders being sacked by homeowners literally supervising their every step.

Ten months extends to two years as Dorran project manages and labours in between stints at sea, when all work stops while he’s off site. He even resorts to building internal walls himself because he can’t find anyone to do it for him.

‘At least I am still married’

Dorran himself says, tellingly. “At least I am still married.” That bad, huh? He says he has always been very “driven”.

Covid hits at the start of 2020 and once again he’s the only one on site. It has been three years, and Dorran can’t go back to work for the foreseeable future, so no more disappearing. He’s on the tools full time now, and he’s with the children – family has become a lot more important.

McCloud returns to find they have moved in – the house is an unfinished mess. It is still a building site. They won’t hire more people to come in and do the work “inaccurately and wrong”. They have clearly lost all trust of all workers.

McCloud is concerned about Dorran’s stamina. “This building needs to be beautiful and precise,” he says. “It needs extraordinary amounts of care and craftsmanship. Will he be able to finish it, or will it finish him?”

Grand reveal – it has taken five years.

How do you describe the house? McCloud tries: “It’s like a concrete submarine,” he says. “The grass is taller than the building.”

“There’s no clue as to what lies beneath, until you are standing on the precipice and looking down into the abyss.” And then you see the broad steps leading down to the house, and McCloud is in awe of the scale and craft skills. He steps down and says he doesn’t feel as though he is underground because the outdoor area is wide and there’s a lot of sky up there.

But let’s face it. He is standing in a hole. They are living in a hole, with all that splendid countryside nowhere in sight. Until you get into the living room, where they have that one “Teletubby” window that looks out to grass and a couple of trees in the distance. The rest of the house is backed up to earth, and the only windows, beside skylights, are those that look into the subterranean courtyard, which is at least large and light-filled.

‘Huge subwoofer in the country’

It’s “Dorran’s concrete coliseum”. “This huge subwoofer in the countryside is a masterpiece of geometry,” McCloud says. And it is. But it is very weird to view it from above. It looks like an inside-out house, a very small quarry or open-cast mine.

But there’s no winding road down into the quarry – the cars are lifted down from the meadow in a car lift – Dorran’s favourite part of the house.

Yes, the house is a magnificent, sculptural piece of architecture – those curved vaulted ceilings are stunning, and they have furnished it beautifully. A tube-shaped passageway links the two ends of the house, with the four bedrooms tucked further back into the hill.

But would you not wonder what was going on outside the bunker, for that is precisely what this is? Dorran is a sea captain – perhaps he’s already working on huge periscopes.

And there’s the massive cost of all this. Despite being subterranean, or because of that, this is not a build that treads lightly on the land. They won’t divulge an exact figure, except to confirm it is well over £1.1 million, but “hopefully” not as much as £1.9m. Is that embarrassment? They must know.

This may be a very grand hobbit house on steroids, but I’ll take a tree house any day.