Behind Grand Designs NZ’s big-budget season opener: Host Tom Webster on the extravagance of Earnscleugh Castle
And so, the tenth season of Grand Designs NZ starts with a project that represents the biggest amount of money ever spent in the show’s history. If you don’t want the total spoiled until you see it, avoid our very last question with presenter Tom Webster below.
But the grand design is not some designer coastal bunker with a chopper pad above the wine cellar on a private island, like the ones on Phil Spencer’s architectural beauty contest, NZ’s Best Homes. No. It’s a 1920s castle among the apple orchards and bike trails of Central Otago. It’s a building which was started more than 100 years ago. It’s a brick house which, until recently, heeded to the immortal words of The Commodores’ song: “She is mighty-mighty and she is just lettin’ it all hang out.”
No, Webster and the producers of the time-lapse construction programme have not been waiting a century for completion. It’s just that Earnscleugh Castle, just out of Clyde, was first built in the early 1920s and never quite finished. Its enterprising first owners, the Spain family turned the local pestilence into a canned rabbit meat empire. A case of when life gives you leporum ….
But after a post-WWI tinned bunny market downturn and the Great Depression, the money ran out and the bricks and concrete columns never got plastered and the parapets weren’t finished. Which, in the show, makes for an interesting argument with the heritage consultant at the Central Otago District Council, who rules that taking the building beyond the original stage of completion is not on.
The grand building has suffered various indignities during the years. Among them, the next Spain generation dividing the house in two with a wall, so two brothers’ families could live there ignoring the other. The show restrained itself from describing this as the “Spanish Civil War” (boom-tish), though Kevin McCloud definitely would have.
And as it’s shifted through various subsequent owners, and the land around it has been subdivided, the place and its two brick ancillary buildings have essentially taken on the air of those other Otago landmarks, decrepit Dunedin student flats.
Enter monied Auckland couple Ryan Sanders and Marco Creemers, who have been very successful in their respective tourist and property management businesses, who buy the place in 2022 and then go about turning it into a place for them to live happily ever after together and run as deeply upholstered luxury accommodation.
The place has already figured in other media under inaccurate headlines about being “restored to former glory”. As the episode shows, Creemers and Sanders do rather more than that. As well as studiously overseeing the restoration of the joinery and supplying the occasional tears, Creemers even has time to reupholster an old sofa that has sat for decades on the front terrace. He laughs when the camera catches him stabbing himself with a needle while reattaching the springs. And in a house which now looks like the set for a Ngaio Marsh murder mystery, and where you hope there are Agatha Christies in the library – yes it has a library – “Blood on the Chesterfield” might be a good title.
What Tom Webster, still an architect when he’s not working on the show, had to say about the project.
Being from the UK, what were your first impressions architecturally about this stately home plonked in NZ stone-fruit and wine country?
Although Earnscleugh is a castle by name, I think a stately home is a better way of thinking about it. A castle, in my imagination, is a turreted affair designed to keep our marauding medieval armies. There is definitely a familiarity for me about stately homes given that there is no shortage of them in the UK. At times, when visiting Earnscleugh, I had to remind myself what part of the planet I was on!