We chat to architecture and interiors guru, and presenter of Channel 4’s Grand Designs, Kevin McCloud.
He’s one of TV’s most recognisable face, and voices, a guru of architecture and interiors and a champion of sustainable, sensible home owning, building and living. StyleNest take five minutes out with Grand Designs presenter, Kevin McCloud.
You’re best known for presenting Channel 4’s Grand Designs, which has been running for an astonishing 15years. What have been the highs?
Finding myself in extraordinary situations with really inspiring people. Working alongside great directors, a great team and actually forging a lot of friendships. I’ve made some really good mates. It’s been a blast.
Any lows?
Days when it’s raining, it’s freezing cold, you’re stuck in the mud and you just want to go home. There are days that are just exhausting because half of the time is spent travelling. But it’s worth it. I always sort of roughly gage my days by how I feel when I arrive on set and how I feel when I leave, and most days I arrive in a foul mood in the morning, having got up very early before dawn, and most days I leave on a high. Which has got to be the right way round hasn’t it?
Have there ever been any projects on the show when you thought, ‘this is just never going to work’?
Every series we have two or three projects where I think to myself, I absolutely understand this, I understand the design, I understand why they are doing it, it’s all good, but they just do not have enough money to do it properly. That, I find immensely frustrating. Ultimately I just want to see really great projects emerge and show really great architecture.
Have you ever wished some of the finished homes were your own?
Not anymore. I used to in the first series or two; it was like window-shopping. I wanted to collect all the buildings and make a little hybrid out of all of them. I’ve probably been in more houses than any other human being, other than perhaps a postman, or the man that reads the meter. But at the end of the day I’ve learnt that window-shopping is probably the best way to shop.
Grand Designs is without a doubt one of the UK’s most popular shows. What do you think it is about other people’s homes that we find so fascinating?
If it was only other people’s homes that we were talking about I think the viewers would only tune in the for the last 15minutes to look at the interiors. The distinction between Grand Designs and say a magazine, is that Grand Designs is about the the chaos and the process. It’s an adventure – one of those last great adventures that we all imagine we could go on. We’re not all going to sell our homes, live in a caravan in a field, take our kids out of school and go and live in the middle of nowhere, sail round the world or trek to the North Pole, but we could do that thing with the caravan in the field. It remains a dream for many British people.
You’ll be at this year’s Grand Designs Live exhibition. What can the public expect to see at the show?
Its not just for self builders, it’s for people that want to build an extension, change a room in the attic, alter their kitchen, refurnish their bathroom or to buy a new sofa. Or, they’ve seen a few things online from a number of small suppliers and craftspeople and they want to go and see the stuff for real. It’s a great opportunity for people to shop but it’s also an opportunity to get in touch with Grand Designs. I’ll be there, we’ve got a packed seminar programme, and it’s really just a good day out.
You’ve set up your own sustainable housing business, HAB. Tell us a little about that?
HAB stands for Happiness, Architecture and Beauty. We wanted to take great architecture and innovative design to create the best solutions for less money. HAB demonstrates that it’s possible to build really sustainable, ecological, beautiful places that people love to live in, whilst still competing with major developers And we’re doing it.
Do you think homeowners and self-builders are becoming savvier about sustainability?
I think the government demands through legislation ensures that we build sustainably and ecologically. In a way, the sustainable life is a more meaningful and richer one, a more enjoyable on and a more social one. Because it involves more sharing of resources, with our neighbours, with our families, with our friends. It’s a different way of looking at life and using the resources around us, whether that’s fossil fuels or copper or food, it’s a very enriching way of life. It’s good fun too.
What do you think is going to happen to Britain’s housing market what with property prices soaring? Are we going to become a generation of renters?
That’s a really interesting point because the mortgage market grew in the latter half of the 20thCentury in order to accommodate an increasing number of homeowners, many of whom were buying their council homes. And you can almost see the last recession as a result of the growth of that market in response to demand, but in a way it was the growth of a rather brittle and inflexible product – the mortgage. The mortgage basically means you don’t own your home, they do. In fact, if you don’t pay your mortgage they can take your home from you. So there’s no difference really is there, between you ‘owning’ your home and you renting. So how I see it is, if you stop thinking of it as a single, brittle product market, and start thinking of it flexibly, I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t be moving towards a market where we have homeowners or residents, outright ownerships, mortgagers and loaners, or rent-to-home buyers. We have to develop these different models because prices keep going up. And why do they keep going up? Because we live in the most crowded nation in Europe, we’re more populous than any other country in this continent, our land is at a premium, and we’re simply not building houses fast enough. It’s all an array of different problems that is not conserved by the mortgage industry and we need to move to a much more flexible set of ownership models if we’re going to make it affordable.
Your own home is a 15Century farmhouse in Somerset. Did you undertake your own Grand Design to get it to the state you wanted?
I did, but whether or not you’re kitting out your bathroom, extending your home, refurbishing a place or building from scratch, your heart is in your mouth when you do it. It’s an adventure, you don’t know whether it’s going to work out, it’s a real risk. And that’s what we bring out in Grand Designs. It doesn’t matter whether you’re doing a small or a large project, £50 or £50,000, it’s never the less an uprooting and difficult time. Ask anybody who’s ever had the builders in.
Finally, do you have an absolute favourite building?
Loads and loads and loads. Ah man, I really can’t even begin to say what my favourites are. There are some that you visit and you just realise that they have a profound influence on you and they keep resonating with you. Rem Koolhaas designed a building in Porto, Portugal called the Casa da Música – ‘the house of music’. It’s a concert hall and it’s just wow, it just blew me away. It represents so much, architecturally, culturally as well as in design and decoration. It’s not afraid to put it out there, not afraid to try stuff and mix it up, and it does so with tremendous panache and respect. But I could name many more, St. Paul’s Cathedral, or the Royal Festival Hall, countless medieval houses, 17thCentury Palladian buildings; the list goes on and on. I’m a big fan of Palladio and his work in Northern Italy, which is gobsmackingly good, but just give me any good building that speaks of its time, talks to its place and carries the passion and the energy of the people that build it.
Grand Designs Live will take place 3 – 11 May 2014, at London’s Excel. For more information and tickets visit www.granddesignslive.com.