Northamptonshire family's ambitious village water tower conversion features on Channel 4's Grand Designs

Northamptonshire was featured on Channel 4’s long-running TV show Grand Designs last night (Wednesday, October 23).

The episode, hosted by Kevin McCloud, followed husband and wife Adam and Tassy as they embarked on the ambitious task of converting a water tower in the village of Roade into their home.

Opening the show, Kevin said: “What a magnificent brute. This concrete column stretches over 20 meters into a cold Northamptonshire sky. It was built to supply water to a local piano factory and has been derelict for almost 40 years.

"It's not the most elegant water tower I've ever seen. This is infrastructure central. There's a train line running through there, an electricity substation just here. And this thing commanding the whole time, it is a colossus poured from liquid stone, but never intended to be a home. Yet a home is exactly what Adam and Tassie, its new owners, want it to become.”

In 2019, the couple shared: “We always had a dream, a passion to self-build. We were looking for old farms or barns or something like that we could convert, and then we came across this. I thought it was amazing. Adam’s always been confident. I'm a bit more like, ‘oh my god, what have we done?’ What we want to do with it is for it to be fun, but it's got to be practical as well.”

Adam and Tassy travelled the world in a motorhome and started a family before settling in North London. They later decided to settle in Roade. Tassie works in a bank, and Adam is a plumber. They have two children and another on the way.

The couple bought the site in 2018 for £100,000, along with just under half an acre of land, and were ready to start building in 2019.

Visiting the site, Kevin remarked: “It is twice as big inside as you think it's going to be. It's huge. [It’s a] monster task.”

Kevin explained the couple's ambitious plans, which can be viewed here. He said: “On the first floor, more concrete will form the warm floor of three more bedrooms, a classroom, and even a secret room for the kids.

"The top floor of the tower will be the open-plan main bedroom suite. Five cores and over 250 tons of concrete will create a rabbit warren of three and a half floors connected by stairs, a slide, and a fireman's pole. It may seem extraordinary, but it's all quite pedestrian compared to the tank itself—big enough to hold two three-bedroom houses.

"Adam and Tassie want to make a two-floor luxury entertainment space with a swimming pool, a cinema room, a kitchen, and an outdoor Sky Garden formed by removing a quarter of the tank's roof. The ambition is spectacular, the materials unforgiving, and the challenge completely bonkers.”

Adam confirmed he would be doing 95 percent of the work himself, on a budget of around £500,000.

Kevin questioned: “So, just to be clear, your notion of spending between four and five hundred thousand pounds on this now is based not on what it will cost, but on what you have available.”

Kevin returned in October 2023, and while the site was not yet finished, the family had made progress and begun living in the space.

Catching up with the couple, they shared: “The amount of energy given to working, to doing that amount of hours—basically working a full-time job, coming home, and carrying on working. I think it's going to be a case of now just going gung-ho and throwing ourselves fully into it. So I'm probably the one that's worried about failing. But if you're not failing, you're not trying, are you? You’ve got to keep going. People that don't fail are not trying.”

Kevin reflected: “On paper, your circumstances, your resources, how much money you've got, what's needed—it does not make sense. But I look at the pair of you, and as I've got to know you, I’m now betting on you doing this. In a way, I'll be surprised if you don't, because everything you've shown—all the resolve, all the hours you’ve put in—it all says to me it’ll happen, you’ll finish.”

Watch the programme on Channel 4 on Demand here.