Glorious Canberra bricks

The new episode of Grand Designs Australia features a house built from Canberra red bricks and the floorboards of the Canberra Centre.

Transcript

00:00These are Canberra red bricks, and they're an iconic brick.

00:04I think half of Canberra is built out of them,

00:07and as Canberra has, well, as people have renovated

00:10or knocked down and rebuilt houses,

00:13there's been these red bricks that are available,

00:16and for a while there, you could pick them up really easily.

00:19I think they were cheap,

00:21and now they're getting really hard to find,

00:24and they're expensive,

00:25because I think people are starting to see their value,

00:28both just in the beauty of them,

00:32but just the functional property, too.

00:34There's a lot of gumtree and Facebook marketplace

00:37and scouring.

00:39We needed thousands and thousands of them,

00:42which meant it's, normally you do a project,

00:45and you're gathering a couple of hundred,

00:46and you might build a pizza oven or build a path,

00:48but to build a whole house out of them,

00:50it's a whole different ballgame, so.

00:53People are quite precious about their Canberra reds, though.

00:55You do find that some people are like,

00:57I don't know, I'm saving those for a project

00:58that I'm gonna do one day,

01:01but no, listen, we've gathered them

01:03from a myriad of places,

01:05and it's been a labour of love for a number of years.

01:09So the top of this table is the old floorboards

01:12from the Canberra Centre,

01:14and they were picked up by a local craftsman

01:17who found them in a skip out the back,

01:20and many years later,

01:22I happened to cross the table on gumtree,

01:24and he'd made it, was leaving town,

01:27and I picked it up for the bargain price of $100,

01:31thinking that it would be a workbench for the shed,

01:33but it was far too beautiful for that,

01:35so it's found a place in our home,

01:37and I can't see us ever replacing it, to be honest.

01:40I think it'll be here for as long as we are.