But his search for answers became clear when he visited Tasmania and ended up buying an 8.5ha parcel of land at Franklin, in the Huon Valley.

The sloping bush block offers sweeping views of the Huon River, while also being flanked by bushland.

And it has turned out to be a haven of tranquillity and healing for 37-year-old Dan, who has recently finished building a sustainable hemp home – complete with horse poo render and a composting toilet – on the property.

He designed and built the two-storey home himself, despite not having building experience.

And while that might seem like a big enough challenge, he also did it with a tight budget of just $300,000, and while under the watchful eye of a Grand Designs Australia film crew.

The build features in the latest series of the popular design show, which is now screening on ABC TV, with the Tassie episode set to air on October 31.

Dan grew up in Frankston, Victoria, but had holidayed many times in Tasmania.

And when he started looking at entering the property market, he realised Tasmania was a sensible place to be.

“I’d been living in London for a couple of years, and I was trying to work out whether I should live in a city and holiday in nature or live in nature and holiday in a city,’’ he explains.

“I like the city, it’s good fun, but I prefer to be able to opt in and opt out.’’

He was living in Melbourne after returning from overseas, and began looking to buy a property.

He first looked in the Dandenong Ranges, seeking a nature escape not far from Melbourne, but quickly realised he was priced out of the market.

Then he turned his attention to areas like South Gippsland, but realised that with an almost two-hour drive from Melbourne “it was just as far away in a car as actually going to the airport and flying to Hobart’’.

“I’d always loved Hobart, I’d been there a bunch of times, and it always kind of felt like home,’’ Dan says.

He visited Tasmania on a few weekend trips with his dad. They got a map, drew a circle encompassing places within about an hour’s drive of Hobart, and began looking at real estate.

And, Dan says, Franklin – with its friendly locals, natural beauty, proximity to the water and bush, and location only about 40 minutes southwest of Hobart – quickly captured his attention.

“Franklin always sort of felt right … it just seemed like the perfect fit,’’ he says.

He settled on his current property at the end of 2018, which he describes as “a bush block at the end of a farm track”.

“The property didn’t have driveways, it wasn’t connected to the grid,’’ Dan says.

“It was a little bit harder but it meant it was affordable to me.’’

His mum, Kerstin, and dad, Pete – who were then living in Victoria – flew to Tasmania with their son in early 2019. Dan couldn’t get his vehicle on the Spirit of Tasmania straight away, so Kerstin and Pete got a hire car and dropped him at the property with a tent and some water.

There was no power, so Dan had no way to charge his phone, and if he needed anything he had to embark on a 20-minute walk into the township of Franklin.

But it was an experience he absolutely loved.

“It’s like living in a postcard,’’ Dan says on Grand Designs while admiring the view before building begins.

“It’s that feeling of being very rich and still having nothing yet.’’

He soon upgraded to living in a shipping container with sheds – with solar power, no running hot water and an outdoor kitchen.

But eventually Dan, and his partner Chloe Meyer, decided it was time to build a more substantial home.

Most importantly they wanted it to be budget-friendly and eco-friendly while also perfectly capturing the surrounding water and bush views.

Dan designed the home with the help of his dad, a qualified builder. By that time, his parents – after visiting Tasmania a number of times – decided they were “getting a bit sick of the suburban sprawl” and moved to Tasmania, to a property about 10 minutes away from their son.

Meanwhile Chloe, who grew up in Tasmania but met Dan interstate before moving back to Tasmania to live, also had her parents living nearby in Kettering.

Pete was planning to help his son build the home, while Chloe headed overseas for a year to study for her master’s degree at Oxford.

“I kind of like that concept of taking on something way bigger than what you’d normally think you can take on,’’ Dan says of the building challenge.

“I think they’re the things in life that you end up looking back on and feeling the most proud of. To take something on that’s a bit bigger than you and have a crack.’’

But then the family got some terrible news. Pete had cancer and needed to start chemotherapy.

So Dan let his dad focus on getting well and forged ahead with the build on his own, with construction work starting in June 2022.

Dan worked as a builder by day, while also tending to farm jobs like fixing fences and feeding chickens, as well as maintaining his desk job – which he could do remotely – in the evenings to ensure a regular flow of income.

Despite it being a “super stressful” time, the frame was up and the house was coming together.

But then one October day, everything stopped.

“I was working up on the roof, trying to do that push to get the roof finished,” Dan recalls.

“I got a message from Mum, saying ‘get off the roof before you give me a call’. And then we got the call that basically they were making the decision to stop treatment and move Dad to palliative care. They didn’t think that there was anything else that they could do.

“Dad passed away a week later, almost to the day.’’

Dan took a break from building for almost six months to process his grief.

“Hearing people go through cancer battles, you assume most people kind of have this inherent belief that they’re going to get through it. You have one round of chemo and then get ready for the next one and think ‘we’re gonna get the good news soon’. But it went the other way for us. It was just an absolute rollercoaster that knocked us all for six.’’

Dan eventually resumed work on the house but says it was bittersweet – losing his dad gave him fresh motivation to finish the project, but it was also tough knowing his beloved dad would never see the completed build.

“The fact we designed it together – Dad literally did the designs with me – for him to never be able to see the finished product or for him to not be part of bringing it to life, it feels really cruel,’’ Dan says.

“It’s just hard to wake up every day and be starkly physically reminded of what’s missing, it just really hits home. It was tough but I know that he would be proud and I know he would love the house.’’

Dan’s budget wouldn’t stretch enough to hire a builder, so his mum joined him on the site, which he says was a welcome distraction that was “massively healing” for both of them.

“Dad was 61, he was young and healthy, it was so cruel that he was a tradie his whole life who worked his arse off, and then when he started to think about retiring he got taken,’’ Dan says.

“There certainly was catharsis in just having those physical things to do, something for the hands to distract the mind.’’

Friends and neighbours also pitched in to help during various stages of the build, particularly when it came to constructing the walls from hempcrete – a product similar to concrete that is made from hemp.

Dan and Pete had actually designed the house before Dan decided to construct it from hemp.

“A friend was living in America at the time and sent me a link and said ‘Hey Dan, you should check out this hempcrete stuff’,’’ he explains.

“I thought it was a bit of a gimmicky thing, but I followed the link. Then I did a Google, to see if there was anything in Tasmania to have a look at, and it was weirdly fated because something came up saying there was a hempcrete open house at Police Point the very next morning, which is only about 20 minutes away from here. It couldn’t have been more perfect.’’

That open house was fully booked, but the organiser managed to squeeze Dan’s name on to the list.

He arrived onsite before anyone else, and was able to wander around and ask the builder and owner lots of questions. He realised building with hemp was a viable option in Tasmania and was soon making slight changes to his house design to accommodate the additional wall thickness required for hempcrete, while also volunteering his services on a hemp building site on Bruny Island for a few days of hands-on learning.

“The more I burrowed into the YouTube wormhole of hempcrete, the more it just seemed too good to be true,’’ Dan says.

“It’s got excellent insulation, it’s fireproof, it’s mould-proof, it’s vermin-proof, it’s vapour-permeable, it lasts for hundreds of years and it’s actually carbon negative.’’

The Grand Designs episode also casts a spotlight on Cressy business owner Andi Lucas, who is pioneering the use of hemp in building through her business X-Hemp.

Dan says a small and sustainable one-bedroom hemp house is not as large or flashy as the majority of homes viewers would expect to see on Grand Designs.

He applied for the show in late 2020 after seeing a Facebook ad calling for applicants.

“It was quite a laborious thing and as soon as I submitted it, I got an instant response saying ‘we’re not looking for anyone right now’ so I forgot all about it,” Dan says.

“Almost a year and a half later I just got a call out of the blue, saying ‘we assume you’ve already finished the house, but if you haven’t, we’re interested’. And it just so happened that we were waiting for the final tick of approval from council.’’

Dan enjoyed the filming process and was pleased to receive positive feedback from the show’s host, Anthony Burke, who is a professor of architecture.

“We don’t really think of our house as a Grand Designs house, we laugh every time we think about it,’’ Dan says.

“You can guarantee the season will be full of big mansions and ours isn’t – it’s a humbly-sized house.’’

But he hopes the sustainable, modern design will show viewers that eco-friendly doesn’t have to be expensive.

Due to the unforeseen death of Pete, Dan took almost two years to finish the build – which was outside the 11-month timeline he set for himself at the start of the Grand Designs filming process. But one thing he didn’t fall short on was his budget.

Dan initially set his budget at $300,000, but noted that he expected it might blow out to $400,000.

However, the final build came in at less than 10 per cent over budget – costing just under $330,000.

“I was shocked, to be honest,’’ Dan says.

“We’re not the sort of people who kept a super strict budget. The day before the final episode was filmed I was sifting through all the receipts and bank statements. It’s probably a rare story on Grand Designs. And I’m proud of that. Because we didn’t come into Grand Designs because we wanted to be on TV per se, or any of the celebritydom. It was more for us, two things. To show the sustainable building alternatives that exist. And to show younger people, who feel like they’re priced out of the market, that there is an alternate pathway to having a nice home that is affordable.’’

Dan says his mates from Melbourne – who have been down to stay on the fold-out couch in the study, or to camp in nature – can’t believe what he’s managed to achieve with such a small budget in Tasmania.

The warm, light-filled, open-plan home is climate-positive and off-grid but still features all the modern comforts you’d expect to find in a newly-built house, including an impressive spiral staircase which provides a clever nod to nature through wrought iron railings in the shape of gum leaves, and a solid timber bath constructed by one of Dan’s shipbuilder mates.

Much of the timber used for constructing the house – and for crafting the dining table – came from milling a Tas oak tree that had fallen on the property years earlier.

Dan spent $5000 to hire a mobile milling service at the start of the project, which provided timber for the majority of the build. This saved him well over $50,000, while also aligning with his sustainable ethos.

Host Anthony Burke was impressed by the space and light in the home and the natural tones and textures of the timber and hempcrete, describing the finished build as being “like a little mountain retreat”.

“I was honestly a little bit worried that this was going to feel a little bit like some sort of hippie nightmare, but it doesn’t feel like that at all,’’ he admits.

“And you’ve just got to say that this view is to die for.’’

Dan agrees that the view is magical and has been perfectly framed by the home’s double-glazed windows.

“It turns out that the best part of the build was already done before we started – and that was the view – so all we had to do was point the windows in the right direction,’’ he says.

Dan is thankful he decided to opt for nature living over city living.

“I had a sliding doors moment,’’ he reveals.

“I had actually bid on a small apartment in a block of flats in Albert Park (an inner suburb of Melbourne) a while before (deciding to buy a block in Tasmania). I got outbid by some lady and I couldn’t be more pleased and relieved that happened – it would have been a very different pathway.’’

He says living in a sustainable house, which he and his dad designed together, had been wonderful for him and Chloe.

“I always had belief in the design of the house, the question was whether I could pull it off,’’ Dan says.

“It’s definitely special, we absolutely love it. We just feel hugely lucky.’’•

Grand Designs Australia is now screening on ABC TV on Thursdays at 8pm, and on iview. Dan and Chloe’s Franklin home features in episode four, on October 31. iview.abc.net.au