Episode Information Devon: The Round House

Date Published:

10/06/2008

For the last 20 years, Pat Becker has been living in a large Georgian family house overlooking the sea in Devon. Now that her family have flown the nest and the house has grown too big for her, she's decided to build a new home at the bottom of the garden.

Shaped like a curvy seashell, the new house has concrete and polystyrene walls, which spiral down from the central staircase. Her architect has promised it will take only six months to build but constructing a round house is never straightforward!

The Build

It always looked like a big ask to create such a spectacular house on such a tight budget. When you throw in Pat's understandable desire to kit the house out to the highest possible specification it is easy to see how the project ran past the projected £200,000 budget. But to double the spending on a project like this shows either bad planning or inefficient execution, or a combination of both.

That said, the results are individual, while not being to everybody's taste. The finished house also has some wonderful details and a high quality finish that would have been impossible to attain by sticking to the original budget.