Turner Works – Carl Turner

Faced with the challenge of being relatively unknown but having skills and ambition, Carl Turner set out to design and build his own house, and decided to try his luck and call the Channel 4 TV show Grand Designs . They accepted and started filming and following the construction process. ‘It caused a great deal of stress being on TV with my own house. The pressure to do it well was obviously heavy,’ says Turner. However, the project, completed in 2012, went well, won the Manser Medal and Turner quickly became a household name. ‘Often when I went to events, strangers started talking to me, and I had to ask them whether we had met before. It turned out that they had seen me on TV. It put my name and my face together. To many people, my TV presence was almost like an endorsement, that I was a trustworthy person.’