A Grand Designs couple left locals ‘aghast’ with their plans to knock down a beloved hilltop fortress in order to build the first castle erected in the UK for 100 years.

Entrepreneur Piers and police officer Emma bought the Warwickshire property for £1.4million, planning to demolish it in favour of a huge castle made from recycled bricks in the show’s biggest project of all time.

The couple, who appear on the Channel 4 show tonight, hoped the building would be a ‘modern family home’ to share with their two daughters.

Their initial budget was £2 million for the build, complete with a tower, castellations, a moat, arrow slits, and courtyards with loggias, but costs eventually spiralled to £5 million.

And their lofty ambitions baffled host Kevin McCloud, who, even after 25 years of fronting the show, said: ‘You’d have to be out of your mind to build something like this.’

Locals, meanwhile, were left furious at the couple’s plans to knock down the original hilltop ‘folly’ castle that had been suggested by the Prince Regent to Lord and Lady Hertford at the turn of the 18th century and could be seen for miles over the surrounding countryside.

Speaking on the show, one person said: ‘I’m absolutely aghast. I can’t believe that they would demolish such a lovely building.’

A second added: ‘I’m devastated, whatever comes in its place is going to be a hard task to follow.’

Piers, however, said the existing structure was a ‘horrible looking building’ made from ‘pebble dash’.

By contrast, the new home would be as close to achieving net zero energy as possible, with bricks made from recycled materials, photovoltaic roof slates, air source heat pumps and a wind turbine.

Measuring in at nearly 1,100 square metres with 25,000 blocks, 14,000 fake tiles and 81 windows, it didn’t take long for the couple’s budget to soar and the project to be in peril, with Piers forced to sell multiple businesses and properties, and even borrow his mother’s pension fund to fund it.

The old castle, it soon turned out, was an asbestos-riddled nightmare, creating £100,000 of unforeseen costs from the outset.

It took an additional four weeks for the property to be deemed safe enough to be destroyed – another hefty sum, considering their £10,000-a-month workforce costs.

Emma admitted: ‘Our bills each month are eye-wateringly large figures, £50,000 to £100,000 each month.’

Piers owns five start-up businesses, launching the first at just 15 years old and winning Young Entrepreneur Of The Year aged 31.

To fund soaring costs, he was forced to sell businesses and ‘some mortgages and some properties’ for an undisclosed sum, including a London flat used for work, a family house on the south coast and even his car.

hurdles came raining down in the form of the coronavirus pandemic and terrible weather, while the supplier of the castle’s 25,000 bricks went into administration.

Piers decided to make one of the ground workers, Matt Allen, the project manager, despite him admitting he’d ‘never built a house before’.

By March 2023, the couple was already £1million over budget – and the banks rejected Piers’ application for a mortgage.

He even visited his mother, Trisha, to ask for a six-figure loan from her pension fund.

‘Asking them to gamble their future on a project I don’t really need to do is a big ask,’ he admitted.

Two years in, a ‘test’ house the couple had built on the side of the castle was sold for £2.5million, providing some much-needed cash.

But this did little to make up for the £3million in costs spent on it and the castle itself remained eight months behind schedule.

By July this year, more progress had been made, but Piers was left staring at 333 unpaid invoices and at last, in agreement with the lenders, had put the castle temporarily up for sale.

This meant, after four years of effort and millions of pounds, the couple risked not being able to live in their dream home.

The final result of Piers and Emma’s project will be broadcast in tonight’s episode.

Last week, viewers were left heartbroken after a woman passed away from cancer before completing her lifelong dream of building her forever home.

Accountant Pep, from Cranleigh, Surrey, dreamed of building a Scandinavian eco home with her partner Malene, but after being diagnosed with stage four cancer in 2021, she knew it was a race against the clock to get their three-bedroom Viking-inspired wooden longhouse ready.

In the early days of the project in 2024, Pep was onsite with builders, overseeing the work despite going through gruelling chemotherapy treatment.

‘Theoretically, I should be dead now, but that merely spurred us on to build the house,’ she told host Kevin McCloud at the start of the episode.

The couple hoped to have their house built in nine months, as Pep said she needed to have ‘as much time to live in it as possible’.

Sadly, just a few months later, Pep passed away. Although she did not get to see the house in its later stages, the builders – who were touched by her story – carried Pep’s wicker coffin and placed her inside the home she invested her final months in.

In August 2025, just over a year after Pep’s death, Malene was able to move into the house. She wasted no time planting a ‘tree of life’ in the front garden to commemorate the love of her life.

‘It doesn’t feel like it’s my project, it feels like we are doing it together,’ Malene said.

Grand Designs airs on Channel 4 at 9pm on Wednesdays.