The Great Home Transformation, Channel 4’s latest addition to the sprawling home-makeover genre, strips away the glossy over-production and nightmarish VR of its main competitor, BBC Two’s Your Home Made Perfect, gambling instead on charismatic hosts and savvy design to help those struggling with their homes.
While the show is often a thinly veiled advert for its sponsors Ikea, it is, at least, refreshing to be liberated from the surrealistic metaverse that has come to define the modern renovation show, and instead focus more on the people who actually live in the houses. In the first episode, we see hosts Nick Grimshaw and Emma Willis head to Eastbourne in Sussex, overhauling the semi-detached residence of freelance illustrator Becca, estate agent Sam, and their four children.
Grimshaw was charming in his down-to-earth way, though Willis struggled to achieve a similar connection; she awkwardly teased Sam about an apparent hesitance to get his hands dirty, and furrowed her brow in artificial sympathy when Becca spoke about the struggle of raising so many children under such a small roof.
And it is here, in moments of awkward condescension, that we begin to see the lino peeling. The show places a constant focus on decluttering (a process which often amounts to scrubbing the residual humanity out of a space), and its major innovation, heat-mapping cameras to track how families use their homes, is profoundly dehumanising – not helped by a cheery Willis reminding us that these cameras are “just like the ones they use on wildlife documentaries”.
Each host tries their best, but you slowly realise that there is only so much any show can do to make entertainment out of Britain’s miserable housing supply. While the series does showcase how 20th-century modernist design holds up in cramped conditions (a book on Bauhaus makes a brief appearance, knowingly positioned on a coffee table), each montage of elegant storage solutions, folding tables, and noise-deadening batoned wall-panels feels like a rearguard salvo in the losing battle between spatial economisation and simply admitting that these people require a bigger place.
The Great Home Transformation, then, is less a celebration of design, and more a suggestion that one might, with the judicious application of Swedish MDF, smilingly adapt to bad circumstances. Realising that, it would perhaps be preferable to watch people lurch around a digital rendering in ridiculous headsets after all.
