The longest running Grand Designs project ever: Kevin McCloud wowed by extraordinary hobbit-style dome house on a Herefordshire hillside

A breathtaking masterpiece has been created for £100k in the middle of the Herefordshire countryside by a couple who understandably never want to finish it
Becky Davies4 March 2020

An extraordinary home in the Herefordshire countryside that’s been a decade in the making, and the work and vision of one man, is the star of tonight's episode of TV's Grand Designs.

In the last in the series, presenter Kevin McCloud marvels at the labour of love that Ed and Rowena Waghorn have called home.

Entirely handmade, down to the wooden hinges on the doors and even a Heath Robinson-style pulley and lever arrangement to turn on the lights, in terms of money the house cost something over £100,000.

However, the couple have invested their lives in the project, with Ed almost single-handedly working on it full-time for an entire decade.

Grand Designs: take a tour of the Herefordshire hillside home

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​McCloud admits that he tells most of the people featured on the programme to spend as little time as possible building their home, so as to spend the maximum amount of time living in it.

But he breaks the rules for the Waghorns because, he says: “The family’s way of life is all about digging and delving and doing, collaborating to produce a masterpiece.”

'DIGGING AND DELVING'

On his first visit in 2007, McCloud finds the family, including four children - three girls and a boy - living in a small earth-sheltered home while the main house is built on a commanding spot on their eight-acre smallholding in Herefordshire.

Rowena tends the sheep, chickens and goats, from which they make wool, take the eggs and drink the milk respectively.

Ed says of the vast project: “I’m very happy building things, so I’m very happy to build a house.”

Presenter Kevin McCloudwith Ed and Rowena Waghorn

The five-bedroom, two-bathroom house is to be almost entirely made of locally sourced materials, including chestnut felled from their woodland.

During his second visit in 2012, the family are still living in their “temporary” home and Ed admits of the unfinished house: “It’s been happening all their lives. The children say, ‘Daddy’s building something on the hill and we’re going to live in it some day.’”

2,000 PLANKS OF WOOD

On another visit in 2013, McCloud finds Ed steaming and bending the planks for the roof cladding just eight at a time - all 2,000 of them - using a method he learned from a Youtube video.

However, the floorboards are down, insulated underneath with shredded cork, while the walls are to be insulated with newspapers - shredded on site by Ed, of course.

By this time, however, electricity, water and solar panels have been fitted and the girls, who even mix their own paint for their bedroom walls from raw pigment.

By 2015, McCloud says: “I’m starting to believe it’s the pleasure he takes in the building, not the finishing that’s driving Ed.”

Returning finally to the house last month, McCloud gazes in admiration at the - almost - finished product: “It’s like something from a fairytale: Mrs Tiggywinkle’s mansion, a woodcutter’s stately home. It looks as if it’s been here forever.”

The centrepiece of the house was always going to be the double-height six metre-high grand hall with a vast cathedral ceiling and McCloud says: “It’s unequalled on the planet. I’m overwhelmed, I’ve never been in a building like it.”

Earlier, Ed admitted that he took inspiration from his chicken shed, shaped in the form of geodesic dome, for the ceiling of the main room, finished in ornate, but almost medieval style with timber framing and lime plaster.

Here, the floor is made from no ordinary boards, but rammed earth - a compressed cocktail of sand, straw and clay, polished with beeswax and linseed oil.

Ed's handmade staircase leads to the three bedrooms upstairs

'I DIDN'T THINK YOU'D PULL THIS OFF'

McCloud admits to the couple: “I didn’t think you’d pull this off.”

Needless to say, even now, after 10 years, the house is not finished in a conventional sense. When McCloud opens what he believes is the door to the sitting room he discovers that it’s still Ed’s workshop.

Although the project has taken so long that their youngest daughter is now 17, Ed is not in the least concerned about their home becoming an empty nest.

He envisions their children returning one day with their families, and is quite sanguine about being prepared for him and Rowena to move into the Dugout - the testing ground for some many of Ed’s inventions. Ed says: “The future takes care of itself, we don’t fret about it.”

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