While the buildings are often awesome, the degree of waste, stupidity, poor planning, fiscal boondoggling, and general horrific decision making, make this show a black comedy. Worse, to treat these egotistical, financially retarded, and foolish people as heroes.Nice reviews by those involved with the show, though.

I enjoy this series on Netflix. Probably wouldn't watch it with commercial interruptions. It slogs a bit with needless repetitions and filler monologues by McCloud, who is poetic but verbose. The episodes should have been 30 minutes. My father built our family home on an urban lot just outside Boston in the 1950's. When I say he built it, I mean just that: He built it by himself in his 'spare time'. I was turned off by the toff attitudes of some of the homeowners in this show. I also researched and found at least one of them flipped a house a year after the show. On the show, those owners acted so committed to the house and neighborhood. They inconvenienced 17 abutters to build over several years. They also devoured an urban green space to build the concrete monstrosity. Fascinating TV on the one hand, but environmentally irresponsible on the other. It's strength is its technical points about building. The gooey interviews with the owners could be edited out.

I've now seen at least thirty individual episodes, and this show is the best of a huge lot of home building shows that are available. There have been at least two water tower adaptations, an early 20thC fantasy castle brought into practical living space while the owner learns how to live with the architectural drawing process, a colourful Spanish luxury home and French historic building conversion built by Brits abroad, and a community co- op housing project built by a group of low-income participants to guarantee them secure rental housing for their young families. The value of seeing this wide range of people and projects is huge - you can see how dreams are realized, the number of concessions and adaptations that must be made along the way, the long-term result when projects are revisited ten years later, and, my favourite, become acquainted with new green building materials and techniques. 1960's building designer Walter Segal's methods led me to an Irish architect Dominic Stevens, who uses inexpensive sheet materials in their original sizes to reduce labour costs. The materials he specifies are only recently available in North America, so this television program has enabled me to specify materials for my architect to investigate and incorporate. The fact that this program has been useful and educational as well as entertaining is a bonus I hadn't anticipated - I'm very glad to have discovered this show. Thanks, Kevin McCloud, for a comprehensive, thoughtful presentation of quality material.

'Grand Designs' is a very good program in which it follows people building their dream houses and all the dilemmas that come with it. I must admit a lot of the designs are very modern, quite impractical - definitely not my cup of tea, but it's a great show but I wonder why anyone would want to live in that sort of house. Just my opinion. That's why it's nice to see people's creative sides work, see what other people like, see people's dreams unfold before your eyes. The presenter is very good - he actually writes it himself, which is definitely a credit to him! All in all, a great show, very entertaining!