Insider tips: how to embark on your own Grand Design with Kevin McCloud
If you’ve ever dreamt about building your own home, you’ve most likely watched and swooned over Channel Four’s Grand Designs. Presenter and designer Kevin McCloud has been running the show for more than 30-years now. He has seen plenty of setbacks, budget disasters and fallouts throughout his tenure of more than 200 episodes. So, what’s the secret to making a design project, no matter how big or small, go smoothly? We caught up with him to find out how best to embark on your own Grand Design.
What’s your advice to anyone undertaking their own design project for the first time?
KM: “I say this to everybody, and I’ve been saying this for 30 years – the world is full of brilliant people that want to help. Whether that’s your aunt, your best mate, your uncle’s friend who happens to be a builder, or your local architect. We show such extraordinary self-competence as human beings - we think we can do everything. But putting up shelves is very different from building a house. Asking for help in our lives is not something that most of us are very good at doing, but it’s a really important thing to do. When you do, your blood pressure drops, your heart skips a beat and you feel good. Just asking for help from any human being is the first step.”
What advice do you have for people to try to help them stick to their budget?
KM: “That’s a really good question because it cuts right to the essence of what it is to be a human being. We are a species in which hope drives us. It gives us our ambition and desire to change our world – to make a better living room or bedroom, to build a new house, or to change our street. All of these things are good motivations, but with hope comes desire and an inevitable drive to overreach. We think we will get more done in a day than we can and we think we will build a house cheaper than we actually do.”
It’s like they said in the military: ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail’. If you plan and prepare it’s where you will save money.
Kevin McCloud
“If you get a good quantity surveyor on board who can look at your project dispassionately and tell you how much it’s going to cost, then that’s a good start. It’s asking for help, and you need someone pragmatic to help you. It’s like they say in the military: ‘fail to prepare, prepare to fail.’ If you spend three years planning a project you will spend three years building it, but if you spend five years planning a project then you may only spend one year building it. If you plan and prepare it’s where you will save money.”
What about dealing with setbacks in a project?
KM: “The trouble is that on television we are used to seeing people get into trouble and then magically getting out of it. How did they do that? Usually by writing a very large cheque. Chequebook architecture, or spending your way out of a hole, is a lazy way of dealing with problems. I think that most of us forget that the best solutions are those which are thought about.”
“We want things to be made good instantly in our lives, but that only happens with hard work, application, and thought. The best thing about us as a species is that we are creative and we can think our way out of problems. Don’t be duped by fairy tale stories – roll your sleeves up, sit down with those around you and share the problem to see how you can solve it.”
How is sustainability changing the way we design?
KM: “Whereas the green home of 15 years ago might have had technology bolted on to it, now the sustainable home almost has an aesthetic. It can look like anything, but it should have thick walls and heavy concrete for cooling, triple glazing and external shading. These demands really affect how a building looks. Architecture is being driven by science and functionality, and the physics of the fact that summers are getting hotter and winters are getting wetter. As our weather patterns are changing, we are becoming much more aware of a need for resilience and so we are designing that into buildings and that’s changing the way that they look.”
If you could only choose one colour for an interior project, what colour would it be and why?
KM: “As I get older, I’m fitting more into my socio-economic age group stereotype and I’m using more white. Here’s a piece of colour physiology: the average 70-year-old only has 12% of their colour receptor cells in their retina, so you need between seven and eight times as much light when you are older. If you ask a 25-year-old what colours they’re using to paint their house they use dark, rich and deep colours and they can because they’re in their 20s. Whereas I am at an age where I am thinking that I need five times as much light and I need everything to be white please.”
Tempted to embark on your own Grand Design project? We have all of the tools that you need to start your own home makeover. For more tips and insider info on how to get started, check out the latest tips and tricks on our magazine.
Grand Designs Live will return to Excel London from 30th April – 8th May 2022.
Grand Designs: The Streets airs on Wednesdays, 9pm on Channel 4.
For more information visit www.granddesignslive.com.