Twenty-two seasons of The Block and Channel Nine has never once given contestants a water view. That drought is over. This season lands in Mount Eliza on the Mornington Peninsula, a one-hour run from the Melbourne CBD, where five brand-new teams have just been handed keys to houses looking straight out over Port Phillip Bay. Before a single tile has been laid, the first fight is already locked in: who gets which house, and it all comes down to a guest bedroom.
Key Moments This Episode
- DRAMAEvery team is living together this season in one shared house, which turns out to be last year’s contestants Ben and Emma’s own home, fitted out for the occasion by Freedom and Snooze.
- ARGUMENTCourtney, on discovering she’ll be bunking with her direct competition all season: “I’m not here for this.”
- DISASTERTwo teams, Red and Green, were both caught by Dan mid-build in the wrong room entirely on day one. Rick’s response summed it up: “Start from scratch again.”
- RIDICULOUS PURCHASEAdam and Jolene didn’t get a bedroom at all, they got a 23.6-foot titanium caravan out the back with its own pool, spa and sauna. “We won the lottery,” Jolene said.
- DRAMADarren Palmer’s “quiet luxury” brief landed like a bomb on Pink team’s original navy colour scheme, forcing a same-day rethink of walls and joinery.
- DISASTERBlue team spent their first twenty minutes on site choosing flooring for the entire house before realising nobody had actually agreed which room the challenge was even for.
- ARGUMENTA vague reference to “the first rule of the block” being broken by one team has the whole house on edge, with one contestant declaring, “anyone that questions my integrity, dead to me.”
- RIDICULOUS PURCHASESite hours have been cut this season to 7am to 6pm weekdays and 9am to 3pm Saturday, a change contestants who remember past seasons finishing at 1am are still coming to terms with.
Welcome to The Block 2026.
Meet the blockheads
Red team is Adam (48) and Jolene (42), a pair of South Australian station managers who between them run three cattle properties for an Aboriginal corporation and have blended their families into what they call a “modern-day Brady Bunch,” five kids across the two of them. Blue team is Chantel, who runs an activewear brand and is mum to three, and her partner Wyatt, known on site as “Randy” or “the big dog,” an online coach and part-time actor who met Chantel at the gym and stepped straight into a ready-made family. Pink team is Sev, a commercial interior designer, and Courtney, whose day job is actually site manager in commercial construction with a resume that includes renovating 110 bathrooms in three weeks, information the pair are deliberately sitting on.
“We’re trying to keep them at that diffused level where they just think she’s in admin, and I’m the decoy.”
Sev, on Pink team’s cover story
Yellow team is Lisa, a 34-year-old paramedic, and her husband Rosco, 38, who does two-weeks-on, two-weeks-off FIFO work in oil and gas off the coast of WA and is hoping a Block win means he finally gets to come home for good. They’re renovation rookies, a rarity these days. Green team is the closest thing to a ringer: 62-year-old builder Rick, 45 years in the trade and well over 100 house renovations behind him, paired with his daughter Tayla, a personal trainer, and a full crew of his own tradies in tow.
The houses, and the fight for four and five
The site itself is five two-storey homes built on true-core steel frames with Stratco colourbond roofing, split into what host Scott Cam is calling Uptown and Downtown. Houses 1, 2 and 3 sit high on roughly 1,000 square metres each with sweeping bay and city views, four bedrooms, four bathrooms, a rumpus room, elevator and pool. Across the road, Downtown’s House 4 gets an extra 50 square metres of floor space, and House 5 sits on a genuinely enormous 1,435 square metre block, the biggest in Block history. Both downtown houses trade a bit of the water view for a bigger yard and partial water glimpses instead.
Before anyone had swung a hammer, the houses were walked through and lobbied for. Pink team fell for House 4’s floor plan and floated a rooftop terrace to claw back the view the uptown houses have built in, an idea that had foreman Dan wincing about council approvals but ultimately not saying no to. Red team liked the idea too. In the end, houses were handed out via the tablets Commonwealth Bank supplied to each team, tablets that also carry the full 12-week schedule and a $250,000 cash budget for this week’s build. Sev and Courtney landed House 3, Lisa and Rosco got House 4, Rick and Tayla drew House 5, and by elimination Chantel and Wyatt took House 2 with Adam and Jolene in House 1, neither of which was their first pick.
The stakes on this particular draw are unusually high. Whoever wins this week’s challenge gets first choice of which house they actually keep and take to auction. Whoever comes last gets whatever’s left over.
The challenge: a guest bedroom, 9am Sunday, no pressure
That challenge is a fully fitted guest bedroom, judged at 9am Sunday by Shaynna Blaze, Marty Fox and Domain’s Alisa Stoltz. Judge Darren Palmer isn’t one of the three on the panel this week, which didn’t stop him delivering a brief at the promo shoot that sent at least one team back to the drawing board. His read on the Mount Eliza market: quiet luxury, white, light, bright. No rustic, no dark colours, no timber panelling, no walnut.
“If you don’t know what quiet luxury looks like, build a house for Kim Kardashian.”
Judge Darren Palmer, setting the brief no one asked for
Pink team took that one hard. They’d already colour-drenched their plans in navy and ordered dark blue Freedom wardrobe doors before Darren’s visit. “I may have got a blue cabinet,” Sev told Dan, “and then Darren came and was like, it needs to be light, it needs to be airy, it needs to be coastal.” Rather than order new joinery on day two of a three-and-a-half day build, they talked Dan into approving a microcement finish over the doors they’d already bought.
“I have many concerns personally.”
Foreman Dan, approving the microcement plan anyway
Given the timeline, it might be Pink team’s smartest budget call of the week or their first serious wobble, and we won’t know which until Sunday.
Day one on the tools
Yellow team, the renovation newbies, got straight to work with tradies already on site in House 4, going for what Lisa called “a raw, earthy kind of vibe,” anchored by a Freedom wardrobe and a custom niche shelf built into the wall. “We’ve hit the ground running,” Lisa said. “If the room doesn’t turn out well, we know it’s on us.” Blue team, working the middle of House 2’s ground floor, pitched an “old luxury” look with wall moulding, beige minimalist cabinetry and a bed dressed in white linen, a plan Chantel was refining down to the millimetre on carpet underlay before anyone had actually agreed which wall the bed was going against.
Red team’s day went sideways almost immediately. Dan found Adam and Jolene’s crew fully set up and working at the back of the house, in a dark, unlit room, while the actual challenge bedroom sat lit up and ready just metres away.
“We’re in the wrong room.”
Foreman Dan, twice, to two different teams, on day one
Green team fared no better. Rick and Tayla’s builders had powered so far ahead installing the ceiling grid that they’d nearly finished an entire room before Dan pointed out it was the wrong one too. “Start from scratch again,” was Rick’s verdict, not thrilled.
Off site, the group accommodation twist landed about as evenly as you’d expect. Sev and Courtney lucked into the main bedroom with its own ensuite and a wardrobe the size of a small apartment, care of a pre-assigned room draw. Courtney was less pleased about the setup overall: “I’m concerned that I’m living in a house with all of my competition. I don’t like it at all.” Adam and Jolene, by contrast, couldn’t be happier with the titanium caravan out back, kitted out with its own gym, sauna and pool.
“This is me. This is me.”
Adam, discovering his consolation prize has a sauna
Somewhere in the noise, a vague reference to a broken “first rule of the block” has been dropped without explanation, along with a warning that someone would be “disqualifying them” if it were up to them. We don’t know yet who, or what, but it’s clearly going to matter.
What’s coming
Three and a half working days is all five teams have to get a guest bedroom judging-ready, and based on day one, at least two of them have already burned hours of it standing in the wrong room. Throw in a last-minute style pivot for Pink team, a budget already under strain for Blue, and a judging panel walking in cold expecting “quiet luxury,” and Sunday’s reveal is shaping up to decide a lot more than just bragging rights. Whoever wins picks their house first. Everyone else lives with what’s left.
Grab a coffee, get comfortable, and we’ll see you back here once the dust settles on House Decider Week.
