The broadsheet:

The house mouldered like a chunk of old cheese. You felt you would have to fight the fungus for possession. This, however, was not Kirstie's problem. She left all that to a chap with a cement mixer ("After months of hard work, the workmen have finished the kitchen"). She has, perhaps, a rather airy attitude to hard graft.

The local view:

Make your own cushions, she suggests. Craft your pots. Fish furniture out of skips. Above all, curb your spending. All sound advice, you may think, but a little hard to take from the daughter of the sixth Baron Hindlip, whose parental pile appears to feature a lake.

The TV scoop:

Of course, it was all very nice to watch. The only negative you'd have is by getting lifestyle envy. Kirstie has a life that clearly enables her to do fun things like glass blowing and pottery, not hampered by a relentless office job.

The tabloid:

Then Kirstie visits a stately home in Cornwall for inspiration and gets excited by some blue and white china she finds in the kitchen - she can't ever have seen blue and white china before - so she drives back to London to buy an old blue and white painting at a street market.

The industry:

Channel 4's latest property show, Kirstie's Homemade Home, laid some solid foundations last night as the first edition drew 2.7m viewers (11.8% share) at 8pm.

The property portal:

Channel 4 got this show just right. It’s just the right amount of showiness and fancy stuff to make it interesting, but it’s also got an appealing side to it as well. I imagine a lot of people are going to be making cushion covers after this.

It was a hard show to take an opinion on. I liked the way it championed local artisans. I thought Kirstie's tour around her parents' pad was unwise; but that's Kirstie Allsopp's fatal flaw... she doesn't appear to have any idea how unusually privileged how own background is or how that alienates a certain sector of her viewers. Interestingly, the result is a programme that appears to assume the hard part of renovating a house is choosing the cushion covers and crockery, rather than paying the workmen to make it structurally sound.

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