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 episode 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.”

Earnscleugh Castle, as restored to slightly beyond its former glory. Photo / Supplied / TVNZ

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.

Plush: Grand Designs’ Earscleugh Castle living areas. Photos / Supplied / TVNZ

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.

The restored Earscleugh Castle bedrooms – and this isn’t all of them. Photos / Supplied

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!

That said, I don’t think it feels particularly out of place. If you had the means to build a status symbol house like the rabbit-canning Spain family did back in early 1920s Otago, a Jacobean revival architectural style would not have been a wild or weird choice. The then fashionable California bungalow style did not lend itself to very large houses, English Arts and Crafts had run its course and Art Deco was yet to come, as was European Modernism. Of course, a truly New Zealand vernacular to supplant those imported styles for a grand house was still some way off.

What’s different about doing a heritage restoration episode? This isn’t a Central Otago joke or one about the history of the place, but I imagine it offered so many rabbit holes.

Good thought – and story-appropriate pun. Earnscleugh was an outlier for us because it didn’t involve a new build or a radical reinvention of an existing building. The architectural interest is, of course, historical, rather than being about avant garde design or clever building technology. The fundamental difference is that the process wasn’t so full of novel discoveries. A new house grows from the ground up (normally), spaces are made, scale appreciated, architectural experiences created. With Earnscleugh it felt much more like a gradual rediscovery of what might have once been. I guess the big surprise was the final overlay, the surface deep stuff, and Marco and Ryan’s full-saturation interior design.

Earnscleugh owners Marco Creemers and Ryan Sanders with GDNZ presenter Tom Webster during the show’s big reveal. Photo / Supplied / TVNZ

If Grand Designs NZ also serves an educational purpose for people taking on major projects, what’s the lessons with this one?

For me, the realisation that came from Earnscleugh was that there is a huge difference between renovation and restoration. Typically, when we work with older homes we are renovating, replacing aged or outdated elements with new, replanning rooms by removing walls, stripping out, updating. With a restoration the focus is on saving as much original building fabric as possible and, evidently, that can require a considerably larger investment in terms of cost and painstaking effort.

Surely that’s the biggest amount of money anyone’s ever mentioned in a Grand Designs NZ episode when they were asked about how much they’d spent? Was there an earlier take involving the host uttering something non-broadcast-able?

Yes $11 million is, by some way, the largest number that’s been thrown at me. I have great respect for our intrepid castle restorers for being so open with that figure, particularly given how much it exceeded their initial budget aspirations. Did it inspire an expletive laden response from me, now forever banished to the proverbial cutting room floor? I’m going to have to disappoint you and say no.

Grand Designs NZ screens on TVNZ1 on Sundays, 7.30pm and is available on TVNZ+

Earscleugh Castle exteriors. Photos / Supplied / TVNZSaveShare this article

Reminder, this is a Premium article and requires a subscription to read.

Copy LinkEmailFacebookTwitter/XLinkedInReddit