George Clarke (The Home Show) Interview
People aren't exactly moving house with gay abandon at the moment. The worst recession for 70 years has seen to that. But what if your house doesn't fulfil your needs any more? What if it's not big enough or the space doesn't work for you? In such circumstances, isn't moving house the only option, regardless of the economic climate?
Enter George Clarke, architect, problem solver and knight in shining armour. Clarke's theory is that, rather than undergo the expense and upheaval of a house move, home owners should simply make their current home work for them. A good architect can transform a living space for considerably less money than is spent on the average house move. And George Clarke, it has to be said, is a very good architect – just ask the six extremely satisfied customers from the first series of The Home Show.
Now, ahead of series two, Clarke talks about the joy of helping people create their homes, what wakes him up at 4am, and how he's helping a young bachelor on the pull...
With the financial situation the way it is, your series is more relevant than ever, isn’t it?
I certainly think so, yes. For a long time there's been a culture of people buying a property, living in it for a couple of years, selling it for more money, moving up the ladder and trying to keep up wit the Joneses. If you move a lot, property can start to feel like a commodity. It becomes like buying a car. I think that's quite an unfortunate way of looking at a property. I think it needs to be more like a home, a very special thing in your life. They're much more than bricks and mortar. And architecture has a key role to play in that. When we think of architecture, we think of Sir Norman Foster, The Gherkin, Wembley Stadium, but I don't think there's any more important a piece of architecture in your world than your home. The recession is terrible, but if there's one good thing to come out of it, it's that people are re-thinking about purchasing houses.
It's an expensive business at the best of times, isn't it?
If you do manage to sell a house at the moment, you're unlikely to get as much money as you want. It's completely different to two or three years ago. And when you sell it, you've got to pay the estate agent fees, then you've got to pay stamp duty on your new property, so you're giving Alastair Darling your money, who gives it straight to the banks who won't lend to you anyway because they can't afford to give you a mortgage, even though we've bailed them out. Then you have to pay legal fees to the lawyers, then you have to pay the removal men to come and take everything away. And then when you move it, you probably want to do some work to make it personal and unique to you. That's a massively expensive exercise. You're chucking so much money away. I moved house a couple of years ago and it cost me £100,000 to move. Money that I just gave away. So I don't want to move again. In future we will stay where we are, and we'll spend our money on the house, and make it into a beautiful home, make it personal and unique to us, and make it into a place where our kids feel really settled. And that's what I do in The Home Show - I help people use their money to improve the home that they're already in, so they don't have to go through moving house.
You're dealing with bigger budgets in this series than you were last time around, aren't you?
Yeah. In series one, the lowest budget was around £35,000 and the highest budget was £70,000. In this series, the lowest is £40,000 and at the top end it's gone a little bit mad. Because people have now realised what I can do from series one, and they understand what it's all about, some of them have committed so much more money. We had one project where the couple, when they applied for the series, had put down a figure of £60,000. Then I moved in and stayed overnight, and when we got up the next morning and they handed over the cheque, they gave me £100,000. And when I presented to them what I wanted to do, I told them all the things I'd like to do, the loft, the extension, the kitchen, but explained that we couldn't afford to do them all. And the guy asked how much it would cost to do the whole thing, and I did some numbers and came back and said £130,000. And he asked for some time to think about it, went and spoke on the phone to his bank manager, came back in and said "We want to do it." So he'd gone from £60,000 to over £130,000.
That amount of investment carries a huge level of responsibility for you. Does that ever worry you?
Yeah! Completely. I have got 12 to14 weeks to deliver all these projects. The more money they want to spend the more building work there is, which means I've got to spend more time on the project. Which means more pressure. This series I've got eight projects to do rather than six, and three or four of them are over £100,000. At the moment I've got eight building projects on the go at the same time in different parts of Britain, and I've got to control that. These are all people who have committed their hard-earned money, all their savings and all their cash, to an architect that they've known for 24 hours, who's lived with them for one night, and they've got no idea what he's going to do. Believe me, I've woken up in the night worrying. Three or four nights ago I woke up at 4am and thought "I don't like the way I've designed that kitchen." I got up, did a sketch at my desk, scanned it in and emailed it to my team for them when they got into the office that morning.
Did you have any problems finding people who wanted to take part in this series, or was it quite straightforward because people had seen the first series?
We were bombarded, honestly. We couldn't believe it. For the first series it took a bit of persuading to get people involved. You're asking people to give you their savings and the keys to their houses after all. This time, we had something like 3,500 really serious requests to be on the show – that's the really serious, plausible ones. We had nearly 10,000 applications, but some of them were just from people wanting their bathroom sorted out or their fireplace moved.
Is it always families involved?
No, we've got one lad in this series who's a 28-year-old bachelor. He'd taken on an old person's property about two years ago and hadn't really done anything with it, it was a mess. He wanted to make it unique and personal to him. He was also colour blind, so he didn't realise his bedroom was pink. He thought it was off-white. A 28-year-old, good-looking boy – you bring a girl back to that, you've got no chance. I told him he'd never pull with a house like that, and he said "I bloody know, George, that's why you're here!" I've said to him that if he doesn't pull within a few weeks of the reveal, I've failed miserably.
What other people do you feature?
On a rather different note, we've got a lovely family up in Hertford with three kids, and one of them has got cerebral palsy. She's got very specific needs – she can't have any major level changes and so on. Then we've got another family who have been in the house for 10 or 15 years, the kids have stayed at home because they're going to university nearby and can't afford to get on the property ladder, and the house is a mess and they want to make it work. The mum wants a fantastic master bedroom with an en-suite, the electrics are bad, the roof leaks, so there's lots to do. It's all about making the place work for each individual family, and doing stuff to suit their needs, styles and tastes.
Have you finished any of the jobs yet?
We did one just two days ago. The family walked in, and the mum went "I know you talked us through what you were doing, but I really never thought it would look as good as this." But we’ve got a long way to go. I'm still going to be doing reveals by the time the series has actually started. This is full on, that was just the first build that was finished.
Do you anticipate any problems?
Well, we had one family who, when I sketched out what I was planning to do, they turned around and said "George, we don't like it." That had never happened before. In fact, he really liked it, but she didn't at all. And we had to go through the whole thing redesigning it in about two hours, because we had the builders starting that day. We had to redesign it on the hoof. So on reveal day, God knows what they're going to think.
Do you ever finish a project and then wish you'd done things differently?
Yeah, I do, but the client would never know that. I'll sometimes look at something and think "If only I'd done that, it would've been even better." So it's not that it's wrong, just that it's not as right as it could have been.
What are your pet hates in homes?
How long have you got? I hate it when people don't use space efficiently – they have too much furniture or clutter. The British hoard crap! If people could get rid of a lot of the stuff they never use, they'd have so much more space. More specifically, I hate net curtains. Why would anyone have them? Surely a window is to look out of and let light in. I can't stand cheap showers, I hate houses that have no water pressure, I hate kitchens that aren't proper family kitchens, I'm not a fan of formal dining rooms, I hate washing machines in kitchens, you should always have a separate utility room. I hate houses that are dingy and dark and miserable, I hate people who are lazy about decorating, there's no excuse for it. I hate nasty, cheap laminate floors. I'm not even a fan of radiators. I think, in this day and age, if you're going to do your house up, put in underfloor heating. It's cheaper to run, more ecological and gives you the heat where you want it. And radiators mean you lose valuable storage space against walls. Do you want more?
That'll probably do for now! What are the key elements to a good home?
Good quality space. It sounds really abstract, but it means a home that's well-planned, efficiently laid out, with appropriate furniture, beautiful quality of light (both natural and artificial). I also think it's nice to be able to look through rooms, from a living area to a kitchen area - either open plan or through glass-panelled doors.
If you had one piece of advice for an inexpensive way that people could improve their homes in this current climate, what would it be?
The one practical thing, even in this market, would be to add space. Either by doing a nice loft conversion, or a nice extension on your kitchen-dining area at the back of the house. Adding the right amount of space, and doing it sensitively, and making sure it connects and flows properly with the existing space you've got. It can make a massive difference, and it can be done very affordably – it doesn't have to be a massive extension.
The Home Show airs from Thursday 21st May 2009 at 8pm on Channel 4.
> Read our previous interview with George Clarke.
