Get your high-vis vests and work boots ready as the countdown to The Block 2025 hitting our screens is just around the corner.
This year, Australia’s favourite renovation show hits Victorian country town, Daylesford. The town is known to many as the spa capital of Australia, though when you’re building a house from scratch, we’re not sure there’s much time left for a relaxing light-therapy facial.
This year, all five houses will be built from scratch and have the same floor plan. The new format will challenge contestants to really think outside the box if they want to stand out from the other teams, and attract buyers on auction day.
In the lead-up to The Block 2025 kicking off, let’s meet the five teams battling it out for this year’s crown. Here’s everything you need to know about this year’s contestants:
Police officer, 30 and police officer, 30
Living in a mining town, located 12 hours from Perth, where the temperature exceeds 40 degrees daily, the married couple, Britt and Taz, quickly reached for their puffer jackets, as country Victoria’s cold and often wet weather set in.
“I didn’t know it was going to be that cold. We come from 45 degrees every day, to 4 degrees in Daylesford on our first day,” says Taz.
Britt is an original Blockhead and has watched all 20 previous seasons, finally convincing Taz to audition for the show. Taz said ‘yes’, but never imagined they’d end up on our screens.
“I hear there was something like 50,000 applicants last year, so I was like to Britt: ‘Fill your boots, apply!’,” he says.
As the audition stages progressed, he quickly realised they beat the odds and were going to be one of the five selected teams.
Before arriving on The Block site, the couple say they had minimal renovating experience, besides observing the process of building their family home, which they share with their children, Carter, 4, and Myla, 2.
“We built our house new with a project builder like most, and then we worked on it ourselves making it into a home,” says Britt.
“We’ve done some tiling, decking, paving but no real renovating experience.”
The team describe their Daylesford build as “modern, organic and luxury” and were influenced by the country surroundings.
“So, lots of natural materials and tones like timbers, linens and rich, warm colours throughout,” says Britt.
From the get-go, expanding the buyer pool on auction day was always part of their strategy.
“We wanted to open it up to as many buyers as we can but just our biggest thing was just consistency throughout the home, so not one room is its own sort of feature – it all flows,” says Taz.
Barber and business owner, 37, and hairdresser and stylist, 41
Best mates for 15 years, the pair met when Mat cut Robby’s hair and quickly became friends outside of the world of split ends and clippers.
Mat had never watched an episode of The Block before arriving on the construction site with the cameras rolling.
Robby, a long-time fan of the show, had been dogged in his pursuit to get Mat to audition for the show.
“Rob has asked me to do [audition] for 10 years, and I was just like ‘absolutely not’,” says Mat.
“I said, look, let’s just apply once and if we get on, then we’ll obviously do it and if we don’t, then I’ll never ask you again,” says Rob.
When asked how much reno experience they have as a team, Mat is quick to reply with a laugh: “We have zero.”
Both Rob and Mat are business owners, and while they have brought the interiors of their barber shop and hair salons to life, they’ve only framed faces, not houses.
Despite this, they acknowledge that their business acumen served as a significant advantage on the show.
“We played the long game from day one. Rob and I made an executive decision on the first day that we are building for the buyer, we are not building for the judges or for anyone else but the person who’s going to purchase the
home,” says Mat.
Unlike the other contestants who live with each other outside of the show, this was the first time Rob and Mat lived under the same roof.
“Mat just came back from a world tour cutting hair. I’m running multiple salons and multiple staff, and just had a newborn, so my head’s all over the place, and we actually didn’t have much time at all to make a plan,” says Rob.
“We met up the night before [we left for Daylesford] for a wine and pizza – there’s not many problems that won’t solve.”
The team describes their superpower as keeping everything in perspective.
“Rob and I have really stressful, high impact jobs and so it takes a lot to ruffle our feathers,” says Mat.
“Even if it felt like our world was about to crumble, we’d just look at each other and go, ‘well, no one’s dead’.
Geologist, 29, and marketing and social media analyst, 31
Currently renovating their own home in Western Australia, Han and Can bonded over The Block on their very first date.
“Literally on our first date, I said to Can, ‘Have you ever thought about going on The Block?’ and she was like, ‘yes!’,” says Han.
“Lucky enough, the first date went well and we applied, and we were lucky enough that we got on – it’s been a bit of a whirlwind.”
To secure a place on The Block, the pair went full real estate mode in their audition.
“Can did a sneaky Reddit search and managed to find the council house plan approval document, so we were like, all right, it’s in Daylesford,” says Han.
“We went into our audition fully prepared with a folder all about Daylesford, basically Can turned into a real estate agent.”
The team loved working with a blank canvas and building a house from scratch.
“This year is a really exciting year to be on,” says Can.
“In The Block seasons gone past, you had to take inspiration from the existing home and what the building was, whereas we could make whatever house personality and style we wanted.”
The pair describes their design aesthetic as very contemporary and were really inspired by Daylesford’s local arts community when styling their home.
“We’ve done curves in every room … it was really about evoking this quite contemporary architectural approach to design and construction.”
Plumber, 44, and dental practice manager, 42
Sonny and Alicia almost didn’t apply for this year’s season of The Block after just missing out on being cast for last year’s season in Phillip Island.
“We were a bit heartbroken because we’d got so close last year and it sort of rattled us a little bit – we weren’t too sure if we’d go again,” says Alicia.
“But we dusted ourselves off and [auditioned again], and we were fortunate enough to be cast this year.”
The married couple have been long-time fans of the show, especially Alicia, who has been watching The Block since day dot with her mum and with Sonny and their kids Aria, 12, Boston, 11, and Koa, 8.
Switching from the couch to the work site, Sonny and Alicia had a newfound respect for contestants that came before them.
“Sometimes when we’ve sat at home watching the show and haven’t quite understood [why contestants made certain decisions], it sort of makes sense for us now because things can change at any given time,” says Alicia.
Sonny and Alicia describe their home as the most colourful of this year’s houses, which surprised Alicia, who usually leans towards a more neutral colour palette when it comes to interiors back home.
“We weren’t afraid to take risks with colour,” says Sonny.
Alicia says Sonny’s superpower on The Block was his management of the trades. Meanwhile, Sonny says Alicia was responsible for the look and feel of the house.
“She was also very good at spending everyone else’s money,” he laughs.
Dance teacher, 33 and engineer/aspiring firefighter, 32
Seven times a charm for this married couple from Melbourne, who have applied to be on The Block seven times before landing on this year’s season in Daylesford.
Now that they’ve made it, Emma and Ben could not be more thrilled.
“We were rapt and absolutely over the moon when we found out it was in Daylesford,” says Ben, who has family in nearby Castlemaine.
The pair are serial renovators and the team with the most experience, having purchased their first home when they were 24 – a fibro shack down on the coast.
They learned on the go, enlisting the help of tradie friends, and completed the home’s revival within 12 weeks – a good foreshadowing of The Block’s back-to-back timeline.
“Within three months we did the reno, the inside was cosmetically done enough that we could move in and then keep cracking with outside,” says Ben.
The duo have since worked on two more houses before their debut on The Block.
Emma and Ben are influenced by their location when it comes to designing houses and their interiors. Daylesford offered the perfect ideas springboard for the pair to jump off.
“We are thinking our style will be mid-century modern with a twist,” says Emma.