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How Butterland Greg got his bath on Grand Designs

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The Nugget
February 06, 2026

★ How Greg Hatton got his bath on Grand Designs ★

Butterland’s Greg Hatton

Greg Hatton didn’t apply for Grand Designs with a slick pitch or a drone shot. He did it the Greg way: rolled out of bed, walked around his house with his phone, and talked a bit of shit.

“I thought, how can we make this interesting?” he says. After years of watching the show, Greg figured the trick was to colour in the picture yourself. So he did.

The story he offered the producers was this: man finds a tree, drags it off a mountain, destroys his body in the process, then requires a spectacular bath.

It was enough to get a yes.

Then he turned to the challenge of the tree. Greg found it on a property he works on near Mount Macedon — a huge cedar log lying on a ludicrously steep slope, chopped after a fire in the early ’80s and left there ever since. Decades on, it hadn’t rotted.

It smelled fancy, but Greg couldn’t be 100 per cent sure what species it was.

“I’m not an old wood-sniffing guru quite yet,” he says. “But when timber survives like that, it’s because of its chemical nature. The tree is basically waging chemical warfare against fungus and insects.”

He took a sample to a few experts and they triangulated the answer: Lawson cedar — prized for its resistance to rot, its stability and its glorious smell.

Greg’s projects are almost always driven by the ingredients he finds along the way — and a general refusal to stick to one lane.

When he was 15, his grandfather gave him some advice that stuck.

“You can live one life for 80 years,” he told him, “or ten lives for eight.”

Greg took that as permission to have a crack, and he’s been doing that ever since.

So, once he’d worked out what he had, he looked up what Lawson cedar is best used for. Three answers came back: guitar soundboards, Japanese baths and saunas. The latter two felt like a good fit for Butterland, the Newstead butter factory Greg has converted into a home and event space.

He zeroed in on a 120-year-old tumbledown shed and transformed it into a supremely Zen house for the log — which he turned into an aromatic timber bath with a view.

At first, he was hoping this would be enough for the Grand Designs crew.

“As we got towards the end of filming, with about six weeks to go, the director was like, ‘Do you reckon you’re going to do that sauna as well?’” Greg says. “And then it was like, all right — pull the finger out for a mad rush of a few weeks of 11 o'clock finishes."

The build came in at around $10,000, not counting the five or six grand’s worth of physio Greg jokes he’ll need to iron himself out afterwards.

The bath is raw timber — no sealants or oils — relying instead on the natural properties of the wood to stay watertight. Timber is always moving. Treat it wrong and it will crack. Treat it with respect and it’ll hold you.

“Timber baths wig people out,” he says. “But it’s just a boat in reverse.”

And then there’s the sensory part. The cedar insulates the water so well it stays hot for hours. The smell floats up with the steam — calming, resinous, faintly medicinal.

“When we find things aromatically nice, there’s often a therapeutic quality to it,” Greg says. “Sitting in the bath with that smell — yeah, it’s very pleasant.”

Pleasant enough that the bathhouse has now opened to bookings. There’s a sauna, a soak, and a plunge pool converted from an old concrete tank once used as a buttermilk receptacle.

“When you live up here in Central Vic, I reckon you need to escape for a month of winter and a month of summer,” he says. “And if you can’t escape through winter, then you need to build something to winter-proof yourself.

“I was actually blown away by the timber bath. You literally have to get out three or four times or you cook yourself. Cold plunge halfway through.

“It changed my life last winter.”

Part of why the space works so well comes down to restraint. The Grand Designs verdict is that Greg smashed it — not because he went bigger or fancier, but because he knew when to stop.

The bathhouse feels so dang good because nothing interrupts the eye. Nothing rushes you.

“If there’s something awkward or confronting in a room, your body reacts,” Greg says. “It’s primal. You hesitate.”

He’s thought a lot about this. When he was first out of school, Greg did town planning — because he wasn’t happy with how Melbourne was being designed.

(That should tell you all you need to know about Greg.)

“I think you’ve got to approach stuff with a critical eye and not settle for poor design,” he says.

Despite the edit hinting at looming disaster (“Will the bath leak?”), Greg was confident. He’d already built one bath before the cameras arrived.

The jeopardy was a bit manufactured — as was the surprise storyline about him needing to finish the project to entice a lady into his life. That resulted in a flurry of DMs.

Now he’s focused on sending his work out into the world. There’s enough cedar left for another dozen baths, and a couple more saunas are already underway.

“I like making things that people have a really nice time in,” Greg says.

❀ First birthday shenanigans ❀

Table Records and Tortoise Espresso have been lifting the vibes on Hargraves St for a whole year now.

To celebrate, they are throwing a party on Saturday and we are all invited.

The curtains will be open and DJs will be in the house from 10am.

Tortoise’s Lloyd and Table Records’ Ali will get behind the decks, along with Josh Meadows from It's a Jangle Out There, 3pt. Turner, Jen Moore, DJ Eggy, Mel Musu and Tom Tootall.

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