A GRAND Designs homeowner who was called nuts for his world-first house design is still living there despite losing £200,000 on it.
Richard Hawkes, 49, and wife Sophie, 50, designed a "gravity defying" house which was dubbed "lunacy" by the show's presenter.
The fancy gaff was built near Maidstone, and featured an arch roof that the pair dreamed of when they first bought the land that the home was built on.
Although the roof helped the home to stand out with its unique look - the specialist way of building it proved to be a huge problem.
The couple consulted a master builder and together decided on a method called Timbrel Vaulting, which consists of weaving layers of tiles together which compress and are held together with plaster.
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When Richard first decided on the idea, everyone around him called it "bonkers".
The roof arch ended up being 20 metres wide, nine metres high and 100mm thick, sporting three layers of woven tiles.
He said: "It's a fantastic technique. So I had every confidence in it."
Soon after deciding on the method, he got in touch with a master builder who had used the Plaster of Paris - a type of plaster for moulding and casting - and stacked tiles method on another home.
The technique is commonly used to build domes, and Richard's structure is thought to be the only example in the world of an Arch being built with it.
But the technique was used before in St Margaret's Bay, a project called Pines Calyx, which used timber and was built by the same chap that worked on Richard's house.
Richard said: "It's used to to you to you glue tiles together in rings, basically, and that they helps help.
"Each tile kind of holds its after the first tile. Every other subsequent tile is being glued on 2 edges. So they're kind of holding each other up.
"The guys at the beginning who were working on it thought it was bonkers. They said it was crazy and was never going to work.
"But as they started working on it as the days and weeks were going by of course they grew in confidence.
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"They're standing and living and working on this arch."
However, drama struck when the show's presenter, Kevin McCloud, was talking to camera while the show was being filmed and the arch fell to bits behind him.
The damage set them back a week's worth of work and added in to the extra costs the house needed before it was finished.
Richard told The Sun: "There was a time when Kevin was on site filming with the house in the background when the roof collapsed.
"I was standing by the camera person looking at the camera. You hear this almighty crash."
The stonemason had leaned on the first completed layer of tiles while laying the second on top, causing it to fall beneath him.
The issue with the leaning on the first layer is that it's at its weakest, and can be easily destroyed before more second and third layers are woven into the arch.
Richard added: "One of the things they were told not to do was lean on the first layer of tiles. It's extremely delicate.
"It's the subsequent layers that make it stronger. He leaned too much. It made part of it fail and whatever that was left fell with it. So that was dramatic.
"They're standing and living and working on this arch. And I think, by the way, the bit where it collapsed was where it had almost gone too far.
"They got so complacent, well not complacent but they're so comfortable being up there complacency set in. They forgot the rule about not leaning on the first layer of tiles."
It was the site’s contractor Tony that fell through the roof, but he luckily dropped onto a crash pad below him and came out with a slight graze on his head, but was otherwise okay.
Richard said: "Our contractor Tony was crying and really upset. Some of the bricklayers were frustrated but it was hugs and 'are you okay'. We had a meeting the next day and the contractor was upset he had to rebuild it.
"It was his responsibility. I said there were 15 people working onsite. Other than Tony falling through and getting a graze and dented ego, no one was hurt."
