CHESIL Cliff House, or The Lighthouse, on the North Devon coast has long been described by fans as the "saddest-ever" home to appear on Grand Designs.

The property, located in Saunton (near Braunton) first appeared on Channel 4's Grand Designs in 2019.

Husband and wife Edward and Hazel Short appeared on the show with "wildly optimistic" plans for a "shining white art deco lighthouse on a rugged beautiful clifftop".

However, it all turned into a "disaster" Grand Designs host Kevin McCloud explained.

McCloud said: "We filmed the project over, what, six years, and, you know, it's a disaster.

"Ed's marriage falls apart, at one point his daughters are very distraught, and it's all hugely risky.

"He borrows enormously and in the end he can't sell the other property he's built and they've demolished the old family house, and he's had to resort to third party investment, and he's sort of losing the project.

"We get to the end of that film and the things unfinished, and it's a disaster.

"My final piece to camera was all about the hubris of overreaching, overextending - human vanity of thinking we can do everything, but we can't.

"If you try too hard and you just pushed too large, you may just fail and it was the most epic example of that."

The disastrous nature of the build led fans of the show to label it the "saddest ever" home to appear on Grand Designs.

One person on X (formerly Twitter) said: "Chesil Cliff House has to be the saddest one ever, purely for the debt they ended up in, marriage breakdown etc."

Grand Designs "saddest ever" home had a happy ending

But McCloud explained, what he likes so much about the Chesil Cliff House project is that it taught him any project can be both a failure and a success.

He explained: "We go back for the revisit, and he's refinanced and, yes, he's given up control of the project but it still is his to run, and he's finished it, and it's done, and it's on the market.

"He and his ex wife, they're now divorced but they're really good friends again. And the family, the girls, feel entirely at one with the project, and there's a sense of reconciliation and of peace really, and of learning and of humility.

"So if the first project was about hubris, the second one is about that idea of reconciliation.

"So you get out of defeat, sometimes you can find the scraps of success, if not victory."

Kevin McCloud revealed in an exclusive interview the mixed emotions behind Chesil Cliff House - labelled by some fans as the 'saddest ever' Grand Designs home. (Image: Savills)

He continued: "It kind of taught me that any project can be it can be a success, it can be a failure.

"It can be a failure in so many ways - in personal terms, in relationship terms that we might not know about, in financial terms, but it can be a success creatively and vice versa.

"You could have a tremendously financially successful, viable project that's come in on budget and all the rest of it, but actually artistically it's a disaster.

"So I'm fascinated by the fact that on a project we might travel through every single human emotion.

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"We don't know when they're coming, we don't know what's going to happen.

"And it isn't the fact that they've run out of money. It's not the fact that roofs falling in it's their reaction to that, the way that humans deal with that, their emotional journey that we need to chart."

Chesil Cliff House​ is now up for sale with Savills (and can also be found on Rightmove) for £5.25 million.