The Best Of Grand Designs

Salt House at St Lawrence Bay, Essex, is one of a succession of elegant and startling one-off houses by architect Alison Brooks. This one is a beach house overlooking the Blackwater Estuary, an endstop to a row of Victorian cottages built by oyster fishermen. It is a rare instance of an experimental British beach house in the Modernist tradition; the house has neither front nor back, but reads as an irregular crystalline form.

To celebrate fourteen years of film-making, 100 editions of Grand Designs Magazine, 100 separate programmes and ten years of hosting the Stirling Prize, Kevin McCloud now delves into the archives to highlight his favourite projects. The Best of Grand Designs charts where domestic architecture has come from, and is moving to, in the first decade or so of a new millennium. And it places people at the centre of the stories of these buildings.