Doing more with less

If you ever need confirmation that necessity is the mother of invention, you can do worse than watch one of the rash of property programmes on Channel 4. A typical example of this genre was the recent ‘We Are A Boring Retired Couple Who By The Happy Accident of Being Born in 1950 And Having Bought A Five-Bedroom House in 1978 Now Have A Tax-Free Capital Gain Of £600,000 With Which To Buy A Place In France Where We’ll Live On Our Public Sector Pensions At Your Expense (Season 9, Episode 8).’ Programmes of this type are mostly dismal. The pair are shown various pricey properties only to raise fatuous objections: ‘I didn’t like the kitchen, I thought it was just too blue.’

But there is a remarkable outlier amongst all this drivel. It’s called George Clarke’s Amazing Spaces and is an unmitigated delight — because it explains how to do a lot with very little. Throughout the series Clarke, an irrepressibly chirpy architect, is converting a 1970s static caravan of quite remarkable ugliness into a handsome second home for his family. Last week he met a young couple who, with a renovation budget of a little over £300, had transformed their tiny Bournemouth beach hut into a kind of Tardis. They had made padded, stackable storage boxes which could be ingeniously rearranged into a bed, a desk or a dining table seating six.

Watching their attempt, I became far more covetous of their beach hut than of the £600,000 houses in France. In terms of happiness-per-pound it probably wins hands down — indeed the richer couple will probably spend most of their retirement worrying about their septic tank (secret tip for expat Spectator readers — try a powder called Eparcyl, available from your local E.