Photo Courtesy of George Clarke
The last ever series of Restoration Man has just finished on Channel 4. My first day of filming was on 23rd January 2008 and it was a day I’ll never forget. It was at the Victorian ice house near Lochgilphead in Scotland, owned by Laird Henderson, who had bought the unusual building from a farmer for the tiny sum of £6,000. The project ticked every box for what I wanted a Restoration Man programme to be.
I wanted our builds to be relatively affordable and accessible for everyone. The vast majority of Restoration Man buildings were bought for anything between £6,000 (Laird’s ice house) and £150,000, so we could prove that restoration wasn’t just for the wealthy or the elite. The ice house was also a very unusual and unique building that no-one in their wildest dreams would imagine being converted into a home. It was a barrel vaulted structure, built into the natural landscape (think Hobbit house) and covered in a few feet of soil to create one of the most thermally insulated buildings you could imagine. Ice would be taken from the nearby loch in the winter and stored in the ice house where it would be preserved for months. This created a natural fridge freezer for the local fisherman to store their fish before being taken off to the local market. Not a single person, since the day it was built, would have thought such a damp, dark and cold building would be turned into a house.