This is the first academic book to examine the long running hit series Grand Designs, which occupies a significant place in the popular imagination internationally. 
The authors apply an empirically grounded, critical perspective to the study of television to reveal how people use the program in their everyday lives. The emphasis on everyday uses and meanings combines creatively with understanding the program theoretically, textually and in terms of its production structures. This position challenges framings of the popular lifestyle and factual television genre that has been dominated by a neoliberal or governmentality perspective for many years. 
Presented by British designer and writer, Kevin McCloud, Grand Designs follows the progress of home owners as they embark on design, renovation and building projects at almost always dizzying scales of endeavour. Understanding the program as both a text to analyse and a site of material impact, the book draws on interviews with production members, home renovators, building practitioners and audiences, as well as references to associated media formats to provide contextual depth to the analysis. The authors argue that, as a cultural object, the program is both shaped by and enacts social discourses of home-making, design value and taste. Navigating public, commercial and promotional logics, Grand Designs sparks new forms of cultural production and consumer markets. 

“Few lifestyle programmes achieve the popularity and longevity of Grand Designs, so why has it received such little critical attention? Thankfully, Podkalicka, Milne and Kennedy offer this book as a serious redress. They deliver us a rare treat in rich analysis of the culture of production and consumption of a programme which has thrived precisely because it speaks to the heart of contemporary anxieties about the self’s right to ‘have it all’ amid global insecurities. Read this book to understand how television navigates, shapes and tests our cultural fears.” (Helen Wood, Professor of Media and Communication, University of Leicester, UK. Editor, European Journal of Cultural Studies)

Constitutes the first academic book on the long-running hit series Grand Designs Explores the material and symbolic meaning of the program in everyday life Responds to enduring popular and academic interest in home-making, consumer lifestyle and transformation Taps into current social trends in consumption and connects them with established television studies research, as well as literature on ethical, thrift, and sustainable practices across cultural studies, anthropology and sociology

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