Grand Designs

Gwyn and Kate were desperate for more space for their growing family and had set on building a traditional new house for themselves. Their plans were scuppered when they fell for a decaying classic 1920s cinema in the heart of their home town Thorne, South Yorkshire. With little knowledge of either restoration or building they boldly set about renovating and extending this wreck to make a family home.

Jonathan Broom has had a ten year obsession of building his own home. He and his wife Deborah have put everything on hold, whilst Jonathan pursues his dream of a miniature Hollywood hills lavish style mansion. They finally stumble across a scrap of land right in the gritty heart of North London. However it's fraught with problems, the only way they can build their wildly ambitious £1million pound family home complete with nanny flat and swimming pool, is by sinking half of it 6 metres below ground.

You couldn't meet two more different people than Martin and Kae Walker. Martin's a commercial architect who specializes in industrial buildings. He's clinical and technical, obsessed with how things fit together. Kae is an art director, a creative powerhouse, passionate about giving buildings heart and soul. They've worked together ever since they got married but now they're taking on their toughest project yet - building the ultimate family home near York, inspired by a giant farm shed.

Marine Captain Jon White and wife Becky lived happily in rural Devon. Then in June 2010, Jon stepped on an improvised explosive device while serving in Afghanistan. Both his legs and his right arm were amputated to keep him alive. Now every part of their lives had to change - starting with where they could live. After countless viewings of uninspiring specialist dwellings and awkward conversions, they realised that the only way to get a house that would enable Jon to live independently was to build it themselves.

There aren't many people in Britain who can say they own their own airfield. But Flying Instructor Colin MacKinnon and his partner, hovercraft instructor and trapeze artist Marta Briongos, are part of the very select few. In fact so important is the airfield to them, they've decided to live there too. Their ambitious plan is to build an incredible metal sculptural home next to the runway, designed by one of Scotland's most eminent architects and inspired by aircraft hangars.

This episode sees Grand Designs bring Japanese design to the Welsh valleys. Tamayo Hussey's missed Japan ever since she moved to the UK 14 years ago with her husband, quantum physics professor, Nigel Hussey. To stave off the homesickness they've decided to transform a tired old 60's foresters lodge into a one-of-a-kind Japanese house in deepest rural Wales - complete with Japanese roof bath, tatami room and paper sliding walls.

A young couple decide to take on an average 1950's house and turn it into an architectural masterpiece. After a year of searching the capital for somewhere exciting to live, they stumbled upon a house on a totally unique plot, buried within the leafy depths of a beautiful South London park. Only problem is the house itself and their solution is uncompromising - radically redesign, remodel and reinvent this unsightly lump of a building, transforming it into a sleek, crisp, modernist masterpiece.

Kevin McCabe is the leading living exponent of the ancient art of cob building, wrestling houses out of the mud with his bare hands. Kevin has almost single-handedly kept alive this traditional way of building in rural Devon. But now he doesn't just want to build another cob house - he wants to build a cob castle. At almost 10,000 square feet, it'll be over 3 times bigger than the generous family home he lives in now with wife Rose and their three kids.

Michael Butcher and Phil Palmer were die-hard Londoners, loft-livers in the heart of Soho - until they fell in love with the beautiful location of Christmas Farm near Newbury. Smitten, they soon took the dramatic life changing decision to jack in their urban media jobs and move lock stock and barrel to the country.