© John Wright

Renovating your house is an emotional rollercoaster, but you have to stay confident and believe in the project and its end result. Everyone who begins work on their home will come to a point where they wonder why they ever decided to take on that level of stress, but you have to have faith in what you are building for your family. It’s not about property or investment, it’s about making a beautiful home.

I’ve just finished a substantial project in my own home, creating a 1,300 square-foot basement on a Victorian house, from scratch. The work took almost a year, but I’m a little bit addicted to building and have had a project on the go since the day I graduated from university. My first purchase was a house in Dorset, completely demolishing it and rebuilding from the ground. Every single property I’ve bought has been run down and I’ve started on renovation straight away. My wife asked me a few weeks ago, ‘Is this it? Can we please stop now?’ Our children have grown up with builders in the house – some of the nice ones have even doubled as babysitters!

People don’t like inviting architects into their home. They think, quite rightly, that we’ll be looking at it with a critical, professional eye. It’s got to the point where my agent’s said, ‘You are never coming to my home, ever!’ I went to a friend’s new home recently and he asked what I thought. I said, ‘It’s great, apart from that bit there and this bit here’. He smiled and said I’d just ruined it for him. Occupational hazard, I’m afraid, but the flipside is they get free advice!

People think of architecture with a capital A, as if it’s something untouchable. But essentially, it’s not about important civic buildings, it’s about your own space and your own wellbeing within it. Renovation is always worth it, if it improves the way the house works. My aim has always been to try to make it more accessible to everyone, and remove the mystery.

When I came up with the idea for The Home Show it was a direct reaction to property shows and makeover programmes. As an architect, I love the brilliant Grand Designs, but I’d never been interested in those other kinds of shows. I wanted to refurb existing homes – ordinary ones – on a limited budget and transform how people live, from how the space works to the services and infrastructure within it. There’s no point in having a pristine living room if the old plumbing in the bathroom above it leaks and ruins it all.

My two grandfathers were both builders, and I grew up around building sites. I was always drawing, and it was a natural step into architecture because from the age of 11 I realised I wanted to understand everything about buildings. Rather than just bricks and mortar, I wanted to know why these spaces were so powerful – the proportions, the light – and why they affected us so much. From the ages of 11 to 16, I read every book on architecture I could get my hands on, and there was never any question I would do anything else in life.

Sustainability and ecological design are usually the first things clients ask me about. It’s top of the agenda now but I still think that we’re not doing enough: from the coalition government, to private companies to Joe Public, we can all do more. The government wants more localism, with the ‘Big Society’ and smaller government, communities having more of a say, but it should lead more on this issue, as only legislation forces us to do things in a different way.

Architecture in some form should be taught in schools. A course that encompassed eco-friendly living, building issues, the importance of environment and landscape in our lives, countryside versus urban areas, sustainability, ecology… it’d be a brilliant way of educating and encouraging future generations.

The perfect house is very difficult to define. Architects have a personal vision of it that changes all the time, from city apartment to country house, to a beautiful mountaintop project. I conducted an experiment a while ago, giving a sheet of paper to friends and family and asking them to draw their dream house. My mother, for example, drew a single-storey, pavilion-style house, open-plan, built around a courtyard. When I asked her why, she said that as she got older, she wanted to live on a single floor in a contemporary space and have a safe place for the grandchildren to play. This brilliant architecture was based on two simple principles of how my mum wants to live. That’s how dream houses start.

People put off improving their homes because they don’t know where to begin. They may have a budget, and know they want to do a lot of things, but that’s it. There are key questions to ask yourself before renovating: where is your house failing you? What do you and your family need? This is where architects come in, to help direct the project, stretch budgets and set priorities. It’s not that difficult to insulate a building or transform a space, it just takes time, and people shouldn’t be frightened of it. It can be life-changing.

Finding the right suppliers is essential. There are good and bad builders out there, and only proper research and word-of-mouth recommendation will find you the best. Building is noble and important. The historian Simon Schama is a friend and he gave me a beautiful book for Christmas, writing in it ‘To George, Master Builder’, which is the way architects were originally known. I liked that because that’s the way I run my company too: from design and costing to deliverability, it’s important to create and build, simplifying the project rather than complicating it. My pet hate is a bad piece of architecture that wastes its potential. I get quite upset if I see a building that’s obviously had time and money invested in it but it’s still awful. If the finishes are bad, the materials poor, it’s a sliding scale of depression for me. Is there anything worse than a lack of beauty?

Where we live affects our lives. A building should make you smile and should uplift your senses. That’s the best any of us can hope for. Design doesn’t have to cost money but it should mean an investment of intelligence. I’m working on some affordable housing projects in London at the moment and though there are challenges and constraints, I know it’ll be beautiful and transforming. What’s the point otherwise?
I get inspiration from film and TV quite a lot. When it comes to decorating my new basement, for example, I’m taking my lead from American TV show Mad Men. The early 1960s were a stylish time and a golden era for contemporary design, with great use of colour, soft and cosy but also cool and modern. Right now, I’m into comfortable and homely designs, so I’m going to carpet my entire basement rather than go for sleek wooden floors, which I would have done a few years ago.

There’s a wonderful book about the love of home: The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard, published in 1958. It’s an unusual, captivating and philosophical book all about the psychological aspects of the space we live in and how we occupy our homes. It’s beautiful and thought-provoking and inspires a lot of what I do.

By Sarah Drew Jones