The dangers of buying a ‘doer-upper’

Is there any television programme as cruel as Grand Designs? At least Jeux Sans Frontieres only offered 15 minutes of humiliation at a time. Grand Designs, by contrast, offers a lifetime’s worth, often with bankruptcy and divorce thrown in. But none have come quite such a cropper as Edward Short who, in 2008, paid £1 million for a building plot on the North Devon coast and has spent the past 13 years – as well as a further £6 million – trying to turn it into a lighthouse-inspired luxury home with infinity pool, home cinema and sauna. What stands there at the moment, however, looks more like the remains of Chernobyl nuclear power station. That Mr Short runs a company called the Department for Good Ideas merely adds to the theatre of cruelty.

Why do building projects so often end up in misery? It is easy to blame amateurism – and certainly wide-eyed private speculators are part of the problem.