Grand Designs star Kevin McCloud reveals fate of show's 'most ambitious' project ever

Daily Mail​

23-04-2025

Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud has revealed the fate of one of the show's most ambitious projects.
In tonight's episode of the Channel 4 show, Kevin revisited Elinor and Born Barikor in Richmond, south west London.
Seven years ago, the parents had come to the show with the idea with an innovative idea - to build an allergy-proof 'healthy house' to help their sons avoid potentially fatal attacks and reactions.
The couple share three children - Avery, then aged seven, Pascal, five and a daughter Blakely, aged three.
The boys have severe, potentially life threatening allergies to dairy, wheat, egg, gluten, soya, oats, pulses, beans and fruits, and nuts, as well as dust, pollen and animal fur.
It meant that the family had devoted their lives to hospital trips and cautionary measures as certain exposures could mean the boys could go into anaphylactic shock, which could potentially be fatal.
When Kevin last visited the Barikors in June 2018, the family had moved into their new home - but, with no medical precedent before them, nothing was guaranteed.
Flash forward to 2025, and Kevin visited the family once again - to see if the home truly had transformed their lives to create the 'safe haven' they'd longed for.
The crisp and modern design had certainly aged with, as the couple had added a glamorous terraced garden, which had become lush with plants over the years.
But the main question was whether the home - with its advanced technology and non-toxic materials - had really made a difference to the boys' health.
Though they weren't sure 'exactly why', both Elinor and Born said the home had 'absolutely' improved things health wise.
Elinor, who owns an art gallery, said: 'We can't claim it's one thing or another, it's a combination of many factors. We just feel lucky every day, it just completes our family.'
Meanwhile the family's doctor, Helen Cox, revealed the number of hospital visits had reduced significantly.
She said: 'Both boys are doing really well. There has been a definite reduction in hospital visits.
'Could it be that they're breathing cleaner air inside the home? I don't know, but they're doing really well.'
The children themselves - Avery, now 14, Pascal, 12, and Blakely, nine - all appeared to love their new home, and had created many happy memories playing in the garden.
The boys even revealed they'd just attended a national cross country competition in Leeds - something that would have seemed unthinkable before.
'The house has probably helped a lot, it's helped with my asthma and so I'm capable of doing sports,' Pascal said.
The family had been faced with planning restrictions, leading to them digging out 700 cubic metres of soil to build a gigantic basement with three bedrooms and windows looking out onto a sunken garden.
Light was still brought in through the huge windows, as well as a glass floor looking down from above.
Pivotal to the building's success had been its unique design, which had been painstakingly pored over by the parents in their bid to improve their children's health.
The couple discovered, for instance, that many building materials and other household items such as carpets, as well as paints and treated woods, can exacerbate allergies because they're made with materials that produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs), chemicals that are easily inhaled.
The most common VOCS are acetone, found in furniture polish and wallpaper; benzene, found in paint, glue and carpeting; ethanol, found in detergents - and formaldehyde, found in floor lacquers and certain plastics.
Elinor and Born decided the solution was to build a house where everything from the structure to the interior design was as allergen-free as possible.
They sold their home in East London and bought a quarter of an acre plot in Richmond and set a budget of £500,000 and found an architect who shared their vision.
The result is a single storey house constructed of walls that are half concrete, half panels (concrete buildings emit fewer VOCs and the panels were the lowest VOC the couple could find).
Inside, there are bamboo rather than wool carpets, while the kitchen is made from formaldehyde-free MDF - even the sofa was carefully chosen to be second-hand because brand new furniture can 'off-gas', meaning it releases VOCs potentially for years.
The house is also air-tight, with the air filtered through an MVHR unit - a machine that continuously extracts moisture from the air in damp areas such as kitchens and bathrooms while pulling fresh air from outside and filtering out pollution, pollen and dust.
But none of this would guarantee that the children would enjoy a better quality of life.
Dr Deborah Marriage, lead paediatric allergy and respiratory clinical nurse specialist at Bristol Children's Hospital, told the Daily Mail at the time: 'Some children with the most severe asthma, for example, may be prescribed a laminar flow device which filters the air surrounding their bed to improve their symptoms.'
However, as soon they go outside, 'say to school, they are then exposed again', added Dr Mark Rosenthal, a consultant in paediatric respiratory medicine at the Royal Brompton Hospital.
After seven years, there was no doubt that something had changed for the family.
While their lives had previously been marked out by hospital visits, Born said: 'Now life's marked out by how much fun we have and all the new stuff they can do in the garden.'