1/63 Ploughshare-shaped home Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud with Mark and Candida Diacono outside their stunning new home. Channel 4

2/63 Ploughshare-shaped home Architect Edd Medlicott says the roof reflects "the whole ethos of what happens on the site… growing things from the ground". Channel 4

3/63 Ploughshare-shaped home Kevin and the couple survey the open-plan living and dining area from the mezzanine. Channel 4

4/63 Ploughshare-shaped home The swooping lines of the roof were all built from straight girders, splayed "like a deck of playing cards" to create the illusion of a curve. Channel 4

5/63 Ploughshare-shaped home Mark and Candida sit at their dining table beneath the mezzanine lookout. Channel 4

6/63 Ploughshare-shaped home The dining area is bathed in light from the vast windows, providing views over the couple's smallholding. Channel 4

7/63 Ploughshare-shaped home The 500 sq ft kitchen is not only for the family, but for smaller groups of visitors to the cookery lessons they provide. Channel 4

8/63 Ploughshare-shaped home The roof is edged in aluminium to reflect its inspiration from the metal blades of a plough. Channel 4

9/63 Ploughshare-shaped home During construction, Kevin McCloud says: "It looks like some mud hut in New Mexico or Benin." Channel 4

10/63 Ploughshare-shaped home The couple will run a farm shop and cookery lessons from the vast barn, which shares the same roof design as the house. Channel 4

11/63 More Grand Designs projects: Self-sufficient Pembrokeshire house The turf-roofed house was designed to have as low a visual impact as possible, while providing stunning views across the Welsh valley.

12/63 Self-sufficient Pembrokeshire house Kevin McCloud with Simon and Jasmine Dale in the garden of the home they built from scratch with their bare hands - and the help of 277 volunteers.

13/63 Self-sufficient Pembrokeshire house Visitors are treated to the sight of this beautiful window, made from reclaimed glass, but with a frame lovingly crafted by Simon from trees he grew himself.

14/63 Self-sufficient Pembrokeshire house The highlight of Cosmo's bedroom is his vast Lego collection, as he learns to become a self-builder himself.

15/63 Self-sufficient Pembrokeshire house Kevin says he is "in awe" of the couple's achievement, calling the house a "clarion call" for the rest of us to live in this way.

16/63 Self-sufficient Pembrokeshire house Daughter Elfie's cosy but spacious bedroom is illuminated with fairy lights.

17/63 Self-sufficient Pembrokeshire house The couple's bedroom features exposed timber beams and organically shaped window frames - made from trees grown, felled, treated and sawn by Simon.

18/63 Ultra-modern wooden Bolton house Paul and Carol Rimmer, with Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud on the flat roof of the house he describes as a "Renaissance bastion in Bolton". Channel 4

19/63 Ultra-modern wooden Bolton house The upper floor is clad in waterproof wood planks formed from recycled paper cups and offcuts. Channel 4

20/63 Ultra-modern wooden Bolton house The couple left a traditional barn conversion, also built by Paul, for their modern dream home across the road. Channel 4

21/63 Ultra-modern wooden Bolton house The angular construction offsets the vastness of the 400 sq m home built on a 1.5-acre paddock. Channel 4

22/63 Ultra-modern wooden Bolton house The vast staircase leads into an equally vast living and kitchen area, with various snugs tucked off it. Channel 4

23/63 Ultra-modern wooden Bolton house Kevin McCloud compares the house to castle, one built by family and friends. Channel 4

24/63 Ultra-modern wooden Bolton house Sitting in the completed living room after an often emotional journey to their new home, Paul says: "It has been very, very difficult, but the result is fantastic." Channel 4

25/63 More Grand Designs homes: Black box, Essex The house in Billericay has no windows on the north or east sides to give owners Michelle and David Parson the greatest privacy. It is clad in black-painted larch.

26/63 Black box, Essex Michelle and David with Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud in the brightly lit living area in front of the kitchen that cost them just £4,000 to build.

27/63 Black box, Essex The sun bathes the patio in sunlight, while the somewhat forbidding frontage gives little away about the illuminated splendour inside.

28/63 Black box, Essex Michelle and David on the private paved patio between the house and her artist's studio.

29/63 Black box, Essex The feature wall in the living room was built from brick taken from houses demolished to make way for the Olympic Park in Stratford.

30/63 Black box, Essex Michelle swapped a shed in the couple's rented house for this custom-built studio awash with light from a vast north facing window.

31/63 Black box, Essex Michelle says: "I think everyone should build one house in their lifetime."

32/63 Black box, Essex The couple wanted to create an enclave that was an escape from the rat race. Michelle says: "It's honest, it's truthful to us. It's by us, for us"

33/63 See inside more Grand Designs>> Scroll right for pictures of more innovative homes featured on Channel 4's Grand Designs, presented by Kevin McCloud.

34/63 Grand Designs: Woodbending house Tom and Danielle Raffield had spent three years living in a pokey, mouldy gamekeeper’s cottage in the beautiful forested Cornish valley where they also run their unconventional business – steam-bending strips of local wood into stunning light fixtures, seating and other pieces of furniture.

35/63 Grand Designs: Woodbending house With two children and only 470sq ft of space, plus an outdoor bathroom, the family had long outgrown the Grade II listed property. But they weren't planning to build just any old house. "If anyone was commissioning us to make the things we’re going to make it would be astronomically expensive. But we’re not going to charge ourselves. This is a giant playground for a pair of steambenders,” Danielle says.

36/63 Grand Designs: Woodbending house Using their combined skills of craftmanship (Tom) and mathematics and engineering (Danielle) the duo decided to woodbend their dream house with a tiny budget of £100,000 - an extension to the pre-existing cottage, linked by a connecting building.

37/63 Grand Designs: Woodbending house Inside the walls are clad with various types of wood hand-laid by a local joiner who fitted each piece together like a giant 3D jigsaw puzzle.

38/63 Grand Designs: Woodbending house The connecting corridor links the restored 19th century gamekeeper's lodge with the modern, Scandinavian design. The original building had neither indoor plumbing nor central heating - making the luxury of their new home even more pertinent.

39/63 Grand Designs: Woodbending house Danielle estimates that if she was invoicing a client for the work they undertook the bill would run into the hundreds of thousands. But in total the couple spent just £160,000 on the actual property but spent more on landscaping and decking the exterior. Their hard work and the materials they chose saved them an awful lot of money. "95 per cent of it is our wood. If you were to buy the wood that we’ve used it would cost you over £125,000,” says Tom.

40/63 Grand Designs: Woodbending house The pair embarked on the Herculean task of self-building their ambitious design. They both spent hours daily outside of their normal working and family lives filling tyres with earth, restoring the old cottage, painting and steaming wood into extraordinary shapes. The bendy façade that suggests the shape of the landscape was hand-forged by the couple with wood taken from their own trees.

41/63 Grand Designs: Woodbending house During the two-year build Danielle discovered she was expecting their third child. Feeling unwell and weak their efforts were compromised but luckily their business had become so successful they were able to outsource more of the building work.

42/63 Grand Designs: Woodbending house The interior is furnished with the couple's own woodwork. Outside a giant piece of ash has been bent and twisted into a remarkable piece of outdoor seating.

43/63 Grand Designs: Horsham fun house This 421 square metre zinc-clad and dark brick barn might look like the sort of serious, steely property that Darth Vader would choose to retire to - but inside it is a house of fun. Channel 4

44/63 Grand Designs: Horsham fun house Architect Matt White designed it with the help of his business partner and wife Sophie, taking into consideration the whimsical requests of their three children. Channel 4

45/63 Grand Designs: Horsham fun house The result of having a four, six and eight-year-old as your clients is a cavernous, colourful family home filled with unexpected flourishes: a hidey hole, a rotating bathtub, a door hidden behind a bookshelf, a secret staircase and ladders and climbing walls leading to a theatre/den just for the children on the top floor. Channel 4

46/63 Grand Designs: Horsham fun house The Art Deco-style living room and continental kitchen appear very grown-up but they contain the dreams and desires of an entire family, with doors that open up entirely on both sides, a pub cubby hole and enough space for the White offspring to grow into. Built inside a steel frame, all the internal components are movable so the positioning of the rooms in the house can adapt with the family's needs. Channel 4

47/63 Grand Designs: Horsham fun house This rainbow staircase is one of two means of getting upstairs - the other is a child-sized 'secret staircase' hidden behind a bookshelf in the kitchen. Channel 4

48/63 Grand Designs: Horsham fun house The double-height master bedroom is an oasis of calm away from family life with views over Horsham and a secret James Bond-style pod with round windows hidden in the rafters. Channel 4

49/63 Grand Designs: Horsham fun house The bathroom suite is revealed from behind a hidden door and contains a bathtub that swivels around to provide the best views of the rolling countryside beyond. Channel 4

50/63 Grand Designs: Horsham fun house The enormous scale of the property is thanks to Matt's background in commercial architecture. It is designed to link with a small 19th century gamekeeper's lodge already on the plot. Channel 4

51/63 Grand Designs: Horsham fun house The couple remortgaged their London home and spent £840,000 building the fun house on a plot in Sussex which cost them £750,000. Channel 4

52/63 Grand Designs: Dursley Tree House Plumber Jon Martin and ceramicist Noreen Jaafar acquired an overgrown, neglected half acre of land in the heart of a Gloucestershire town on which they decided to build their dream treehouse. Channel 4

53/63 Grand Designs: Dursley Tree House Due to planning restrictions and the fact that their plot contained nearly 30 protected trees, no concrete foundations could be built. Channel 4

54/63 Grand Designs: Dursley Tree House So their architects Miller Howard Workshop designed a building that would work with the tree-filled setting. The anti-gravity three-tier design is pinned into the ground on sixteen screw piles. Channel 4

55/63 Grand Designs: Dursley Tree House The house is accessible via a walkway 23 metres up in the air. Channel 4

56/63 Grand Designs: Dursley Tree House Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud described the "big properly grown up treehouse" as "flipping brilliant". Channel 4

57/63 Grand Designs: Dursley Tree House The design is comprised of three boxes on top of each other: the bottom layer is a studio for Noreen, the largest middle box is a communal living space and the top box contains the bedrooms. There are windows and verandas on all sides. Channel 4

58/63 Grand Designs: Dursley Tree House The windows look out over the spectacular foliage and the property is so snug within its forest setting that you'd never know it was sandwiched between a supermarket car park and Methodist church. Channel 4

59/63 Grand Designs: Dursley Tree House Inside the decor incorporates both Noreen's ceramics and Jon's art. The bottom two floors are blue slate reclaimed from an old Rolls Royce garage. Channel 4

60/63 Grand Designs: Dursley Tree House Upstairs the floorboards are a reclaimed basketball court. The couple decided to keep the painted markings which give an almost Modernist graphic effect. Channel 4

61/63 Grand Designs: Dursley Tree House The exterior of the building is clad in larch and the bottom floor is surrounded by a reflective surface that give the impression the house is floating. Channel 4

62/63 Grand Designs: Dursley Tree House The plot cost Noreen and Jon £85,000. Their budget for the build was £268,000 and after delays pushed their finances to the max Jon decided to self-build the timber parts of the house. They ended up just £2,000 over budget. Channel 4