The most delusional Grand Designs couple ever: They tried to build Britain’s first castle in a century. Now read how they poured millions into their money pit, raided his mum’s pension… and how her lover’s buried in the ground

Was it monumental self-belief, extravagant folly or inspirational genius that prompted entrepreneur Piers Daniell and his wife Emma to buy a castle in the Warwickshire countryside for £1.4 million, promptly tear it down – then replace it with another so ambitious in scale and cost it threatens to ruin them?

The vast building project, featured on Channel 4’s Grand Designs this week, left presenter Kevin McCloud reaching for superlatives, not all of them complimentary.

Clearly McCloud felt ambivalent about the castle – the first to have been built in the UK for a century and ‘the biggest self-build project’ in the 26-year history of the show – which had exceeded its budget more than three times over and is likely to cost £7 million.

The Daniells had already burned through upwards of £5 million, taking out a series of mortgages, selling properties and even borrowing from Piers’s mum’s pension fund, when the programme aired.

Yet the vast edifice was still an empty shell, with only the huge, luxury, hand-made kitchen complete, and the couple have had to put the property on the market, meaning they may never get to live in their dream home.

But perhaps just as extraordinary as the ill-fated building itself is, as the Daily Mail can reveal, the story of the two men – both of them regarded by Piers with equal love and esteem – who inspired different aspects of the project and goes some way to explaining the extraordinary chutzpah of Piers which had viewers agog.

One is his father Edward, a former chef, who, as Piers explained in the show, fed his passion for cooking; hence the castle’s meticulously appointed kitchen, built to Piers’s precise specification (there will be no fewer than five kitchens in the castle once it is finished).

What he does not reveal on the programme, however, is his equal affection for his other ‘father’ – the late German-born Joachim Roeser, a successful businessman, who came into Piers’s life just as he started secondary school.

He did so, ‘as a result of a passionate love affair’ with Piers’s mother Tricia and yet was ‘welcomed into our home by all of us,’ as Piers has recalled.

This all-encompassing embrace came not only from Piers and his brother but astoundingly also from Edward, then still married to Tricia, who ‘magnanimously’ accepted Joachim’s presence in the family home. ‘My father recognised what my mother and Joachim had and both men became firm friends,’ says Piers, 43. ‘He [Joachim] was her true love.’

He goes on to concede, with glorious understatement: ‘This has always perplexed outsiders looking into my family. But from my perspective it seemed completely normal and when the time came that my father and mother divorced that was done amicably one afternoon using a website.’

Sadly, Joachim died in April 2020 aged 66 from Covid but such was his importance to Piers that his ashes are now interred in the castle grounds.

Piers admitted that he mourned the man, whom he described as an ‘amazing father’, greatly.

‘That I am still coming to terms with this loss… is an understatement especially as he was still very much in his prime of life having just had his 66th birthday,’ he wrote in his blog in 2021. Describing himself as ‘the proud son of two fathers,’ he added that Joachim was an ‘amazing addition to our family unit’.

He reflects, too, that Joachim and Edward complemented each other; his birth father cooking for the family and sharing ‘amazing’ meals with them at home while Joachim ‘loved eating out and opened my eyes to fine dining from around the world’.

It’s not known whether Edward stayed living close to his ex-wife and her new husband.

Giving a further clue to the inspiration behind his ambitious self-build he says: ‘Certainly his [Joachim’s] penchant for the finer things in life rubbed off on me and we shared many happy experiences from luxury hotels to fast cars. He was pure class to the core.

‘Having worked his way up from a poor upbringing in Germany, he was not shy of hard work and demonstrated to all the naysayers that you get out what you put in.’

Joachim also became chairman of Piers’s company Fluidata, ‘supporting me in finding finance and growing the business’. Joachim stepped down in 2015.

Both Joachim and Edward were honourable men, Piers continues: ‘Like my father Edward, he had high morals and always demonstrated complete integrity in anything he was involved in. So growing up, my view of business was shaped by his view that you treat people well, you get out of the way and let them get on with it.

‘When news of his passing made it onto LinkedIn we were all blown away by the number of people who contacted my mother to say how much he had influenced or shaped them during his career.’

‘The world is a sadder place without him’, he added. ‘My mother bravely soldiers on having lost her true love and we focus on the few rays of sunshine that come our way.’

Joachim’s ashes are interred at the base of a ‘spectacular’ larch which takes centre stage in woodland, consisting of 2,000 saplings planted in his memory, alongside existing 700-year-old oaks in the castle’s extensive grounds.

This living memorial is known by the Daniell family as Opa’s Wood (Opa being German for grandad), and Piers calls it ‘a fitting resting place for a glorious gentleman’.

Little wonder then, with such a huge emotional investment in the place, Piers and Emma are so attached to the plot where the castle stands. ‘We have put everything into this; our hearts and souls,’ says Emma. However, the enormous castle which dominates the skyline above the market town of Alcester, which Piers once represented as a Conservative county councillor, has not won over the hearts and souls of others.

As it began to take shape on its scenic vantage point at the top of a hill, Kevin McCloud declared that the eight-bedroom edifice – also featuring a moat, crenellated roof terrace and arrow-slit window openings – looked like a ‘multi-storey car park’.

Meanwhile Piers, a founder of five tech start-ups who began his first business at 15 and had won a young entrepreneur of the year award by the age of 31, confessed: ‘I try not to tell people what I’m doing because it seems very grand and eccentric.’

Indeed, residents living close to the plot were appalled when the original, familiar architectural landmark, an 18th-century ‘folly castle’, was razed.

‘I’m absolutely aghast. I can’t believe they are demolishing such a lovely building,’ said one woman as the bulldozers moved in four years ago.

Meanwhile, another critic, commenting on X, called its replacement ‘the ugliest building I’ve ever seen’, and likened it to ‘a cross between a prison and a nuclear bunker’.

Few would dispute that Piers Daniell is wildly idiosyncratic.

The charming, boyishly handsome businessman’s wife Emma is a former police officer and now Deputy Police And Crime Commissioner for Warwickshire.

Emma, who earns £44,491 a year for her four-days-a-week post, is a woman of cheerful, no-nonsense practicality; the perfect counterbalance to her husband, who describes himself as ‘a dreamer’. The couple have two young daughters, Florence and Edith.

Such is the folie de grandeur of Piers’s building project, he even persuaded his glamorous mother Tricia Roeser to cash in her £1million pension pot to help fund it, as its costs escalated from a planned £2.2million towards a staggering £7million.

Piers adds that, aside from mortgages and loans, they have sold a commercial property, a house on the south coast, a London flat and a car to fund the venture. ‘Everything has gone, but not finishing this would be a bigger heart wrench,’ says Emma.

‘We’ve wedded ourselves to being here. We’d like to see the children get married here. It will be our legacy.’ But the pressing question remains: will the Daniells be forced to sell the castle – and even the impressive modern barn home in which they have been living during the build – to pay back around £3million they have borrowed? Piers concedes that there is ‘always a small risk’ they will lose both homes.

Indeed, they are both currently for sale to satisfy the conditions of the loans; Sotheby’s is marketing the ‘majestically modern castle’ for £7,950,000.

Emma, always upbeat, makes light of this, joshing with Piers: ‘You can’t sell living items on eBay, can you? Otherwise you’d be up for sale.’ Piers ripostes: ‘Exactly. You’re on OnlyFans.’

Both seem irrepressibly cheerful, despite the escalating cost of their borrowings: each month during the build they forked out £50,000 to £100,000 to fund labour and materials. It is only when Piers visits his mother Tricia that hints of disquiet emerge.

‘When do you think you’ll be able to repay me?’ she asks mildly, referring to the six-figure loan she made to her son. She adds – almost to reassure herself, one suspects – that she has lent money to Piers before and made a ‘healthy profit’, so she doesn’t feel she is risking anything. ‘Hopefully within the next year when the house is finished I’ll pay you back with interest,’ Piers tells her with only a tinge of self-doubt.

Even so, Tricia expresses concerns about his wellbeing: ‘I sometimes worry that he is going to cause himself real health issues. How much more pressure can one person take?’

Certainly, the project has been besieged by problems. Even before construction work began, the demolition of the existing building was delayed by the discovery that it was full of asbestos. A further £100,000 in unforeseen costs accrued to remove it.

Then, as building work on the new castle started, the supplier of the 25,000 ‘woodcrete’ blocks – made of recycled shredded timber mixed with cement – from which it is constructed, went out of business. Replacement blocks had to be sourced from Europe. Further delays – and costs – ensued.

Next, Piers decided to replace his site manager with an affable chap called Matt Allen who seemed mildly bemused by his promotion to a role he had hitherto never attempted: ‘From ground worker to site manager in a weekend. Crazy, isn’t it?’ he commented. ‘It’s a lot to take on. I hope it’s going to go well.’

It seemed to, until heavy rain waterlogged foundation trenches, compromising their strength and adding again to the cost as a further 22 lorry loads of concrete were brought in to reinforce them.

Piers, meanwhile, had already shelled out £3million to build a ‘test house’ on a plot next door, to ensure the woodcrete blocks were suitable for the grander project.

Two years into the castle build, he sold the house for £2.5million – a £500,000 loss – to help fund the escalating costs. ‘The idea is nuts, the project is complex. Why pursue such a folly of an idea?’ commented McCloud, rhetorically, as he contemplated the citadel, in all its uncompromising starkness, emerging on the hill.

By June last year, the pressure mounting, even Piers was noting the huge volumes of material the castle was consuming. The Purbeck stone cladding alone, with which the outer walls are faced, came in at £250,000. Then there were 81 windows costing £310,000.

‘At the moment I’m dealing with 330 invoices,’ he lamented, scrolling through columns of figures on his laptop.

Last month, when McCloud made his final visit to the castle, his initial scepticism had softened. ‘It is monumental… it exudes strength,’ he marvelled, calling it a ‘forbidding fortification, a raw, brutal presence’. ‘I really hope, after all their toil, this building rewards them and they get to live here,’ he added, but still he vacillated about the motives underpinning its construction.

Was it an exercise in hubris: ‘one man’s monument to himself’ or to be kinder to Piers and Emma, ‘a castle of entrepreneurial dreams, of engineering experimentation and innovation?’ He did not seem quite sure.

As for the Daniells, they were still smiling resolutely. ‘We will manage. We will cope. We have to see it through to the end,’ said a perennially cheerful Emma.

Did Piers have regrets? ‘No, I feel we have done something really substantial,’ he said, unrepentant to the last. ‘I think it will still be here in 500 years.’

And that, dear readers, may well be what the locals fear most.