Kevin McCloud talks about new Grand Designs designs and hates transformation shows

This interview was originally published on Radio Times Magazine.

“Go buy a gazebo from B&Q, stick it outside the big glass wall, and sort the problem out.” I would have thought Kevin McCloud would be a pessimist. After all, he’s dusting off the architects’ plans and putting on his hard hat for season 23 of grand designsthe entire premise appears to be at risk of catastrophic economic collapse and climate catastrophe.

But here he is, he tells me I should have gone to the B&Q (“other gazebos available,” he adds, thwarting any gains in the Channel 4 ads section to cool my house during a British summer when temperatures topped 40 degrees—especially if I’m hot enough To build a modern glass box. He insists that far from hastening the demise of Grand Designs, the End of Days we’re currently in is actually playing down the show’s strengths.

“It’s the third time we’ve seen a major shake-up in the economy,” he says. “All of our contributors are thinking seriously, and they are working with brilliant people. If they are in real difficulty, they will think of a cheap and smart solution to get out of it.”

But what about the recent and ongoing crazy weather – is it still wise to put glass boxes on the mountainsides? “Are we really? I can only think of three glass boxes in 23 years,” he says, dismissing my characterization for a show that builds radical home architecture in hard-to-reach locations.

He already admits that our recent passion for acres of glazing has meant a very sticky summer for millions of Britons. But there is no need for that. “Go to Morocco or any hot climate in the world and there are a lot of buildings with glass. It is not the glass that is the problem. It is the shading that we need to provide.”

Hence the gazebo, and the 63-year-old presenter has other fixes where that came from. Think, he suggests, why the “little Italian men” (and women) in their hilltop villages put water on the sidewalk in front of their homes every day. “They don’t do this to maintain cleanliness. The water evaporates to do this, they draw energy from their immediate environment. So, the sun heats the water, the water evaporates, and the stone becomes cold. The air that passes over the stone inside the house becomes cold.”

What if you don’t have a Tuscan stone slab outside? Mop the floors in the morning but don’t wipe the water, just let it evaporate. Or go and sit under a tree. Because the water evaporates from the leaves you get evaporative cooling. Trees in cities can mean the streets are up to 12 degrees cooler because of the rate of evaporative cooling. That’s the basic physics, it’s exactly the same as the physics of evaporative cooling in air conditioning. You can put your hand in your pocket and pay £3,000 or you can let nature help.”

Spending the money, over £3,000, is key to the appeal of Grand Designs. Budgets, seemingly expressions of desire rather than achievable ends, always collapse within minutes of digging in the first bases. Some guests put hundreds of thousands of pounds into projects, and it wasn’t always entirely successful – most notably Edward Short, star of the 2019 episode that viewers have dubbed “the saddest ever”.

Short’s highly ambitious, lighthouse-inspired home atop a new cliff, overlooking the North Devon coast, was beset by difficulties, and eventually put him in debt at £7 million. Much of the adversity Short faced was beyond his control – who put Brexit and COVID-19 into their business plan 10 years ago? – but he aimed at the heavens, thereby angering the gods of property development.

“The project was arguably arrogant,” McCloud says of a building that long ago left the tricky construction site world and became a legendary find. “The drive to build, to change the world and make in our image, to improve our environment, all of these things can go away. And that ambition can destroy the beauty we strive to find in life.”

In Short’s case, he ruined his marriage to his wife Hazel. Quite honestly, the 57-year-old told McCloud, “Maybe my vanity and ambition led to the breakdown of the marriage.” Does McCloud feel any residual guilt? “I see my role as that of a wizard. I am not complicit with these people. I am not urging them to. I am not involved in their determination.”

Thus, he maintains an emotional barrier between himself and the people on the show. As he put it, “If I’m dealing with guys who build then, in some way, I think I’ve betrayed my relationship with the viewer.” But he admits that Short has broken through that barrier.

“I have known him now for 10 years. And I have always been quite a fan of someone willing to admit, with such humility, their failures, in front of three and a half million strangers. It is almost a public self-criticism of human weaknesses and failures. I have become so emotionally attached to them. You cannot That, right? I’ve known these guys for a long time. Their girls were teenagers when I first met them. They’re young now.”

Edward Short and his daughters Nicole and Lauren appear in the new season, but Hazel turned down the opportunity to appear on screen. “We asked Hazel if she’d like to get involved,” McCloud says. “You’d rather leave it to Edward and the girls to speak for her. And I understand why, because they’re still family, and they’re still friends. It’s about trust and being totally open.”

This insistence on integrity means that McCloud is not a fan of changeover shows and deceptions, even though that is how his television career began, on BBC Two’s Home Front in the late 1990s.

“My makeover is the worst kind of TV I have,” he says. “Everything that happens in front of the camera is coordinated by the team that makes the programme, by the presenter, who may or may not be the designer. So an idea is sold to the viewer just as hard as the victims on TV.

“When we started Grand Designs, 23 years ago, I thought, ‘This is a lot like. It’s an opportunity to stand up for something because we like it, but also to stay on the viewer’s side. It’s almost like saying to the viewer, ‘It’s okay, I’m going to hold your hand.’ You are on the couch at home. You’re not angry, hmm. “

Season 22 of Grand Designs begins tonight, Wednesday, August 31 at 9 PM on Channel 4. Check out more documentaries coverage or visit our website TV guide To find out what’s going on tonight.

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