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jmetaB03cc6221358e2d46263f4b776644e9ab07f0b98b5f3ef1cac0f12a112b67a17bfa@df9fe59142e8384a6970c15c298c7eb05eefe661be8e6833cafbf051e80bfbd1rss.itemmetarss.netMb<item><description><![CDATA[<a href="https://www.thetimes.com/magazines/the-times-magazine/article/grand-designs-kevin-mccloud-interview-fgs875csm"><img src="https://www.thetimes.com/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F2fdce2cb-fc13-425b-93ad-ec8ea90ac275.jpg?crop=3756%2C2113%2C1241%2C1020&resize=1200" /></a><div><div><p><span>C</span>hannel 4’s Grand Designs, established in 1999, is a long-running television programme about building projects that overrun. I am inside one of them now to meet the show’s equally enduring presenter, Kevin McCloud, 65, a former trainee opera singer, theatre designer, shopfront artist, lampmaker and, more recently, ambitious but expensively disappointed housing developer.</p><p>Our rendezvous is the timber-framed house that Grand Designs viewers first watched Ed and Rowena Waghorn embark on 13 years ago. In a later episode McCloud called it “Mrs Tiggy-Winkle’s mansion or the woodcutter’s stately home” but in 2011, building — and filming — had already been going on for four years and it remained a shell. Ed thought it would be finished in another two. When the programme revisited it<span> in 2017, it was still only “nearly” done although the family had moved in. McCloud called its progress “glacially slow”, but glacially slow is part of the point of </span><span>Grand Designs. Twenty-five years old this year, it remains slow TV at its best — and slowest.</span></p><span><div><div><div><div></div></div><div></div></div></div><p>“The channel will commit to a season two or three years ahead,” McCloud explains when we get to talking about the programme’s own construction process. “It would be impossible to be working in a regime where you were simply going from one year to the next because you wouldn’t feel confident in beginning anything.”</p><p>Let alone seeing anything finished?</p><p>“Exactly. The whole cycle takes years.”</p><div><div><div></div></div></div><p>On my arrival, one drizzly morning in July, I walk up the hill to the Waghorns’ Wind in the Willows front door and marvel at the timber cathedral rising before me, its huge arched window featuring not stained glass but a limitless view over a Herefordshire valley. With its wood-shingle roof under some sort of covering, however, it seems, even now, a work in progress. Inside, we drink coffee with milk from the Waghorns’ own goats under lampshades made from plastic bottles, the bottom edges of which Ed is looking to finish off with local materials once inspiration strikes. The house is beautiful, eccentric, ecologically sound — even the light switches are made from local wood — and a mini version in the grounds is, as I promise the Waghorns I’ll mention, available for holiday rent.</p><div><div><div><div><div><div><img src="https://www.thetimes.com/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F0ce5cf2b-6557-436d-85df-f59d135b79a0.jpg?crop=4032%2C2157%2C0%2C709" /></div></div></div><div><div><div><div>McCloud on the set of the first Grand Designs episode, 1999</div><div>CHANNEL 4</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>Over the 17 years since they met, McCloud has become friends with the Waghorns and now, having moved to Herefordshire after his recent divorce, they are neighbours. Such a relationship is unusual.</p><p>“The job,” he says now that we are sitting at the big window, “is a bit like being a therapist, both in terms of holding the viewer’s hand but also listening to people’s stories. Occasionally I think, ‘These are lovely people. It would be nice to see them again.’ And then you do see them again and you realise all they want to talk about is their kitchen. It’s like the therapist taking their client out to the pub: the session doesn’t stop. Whereas with Ed and Rowena, we share so many passions and activities and I live not far away.”</p><p>McCloud is extremely articulate, and speaks in the beautifully modulated voice of the singer he might have been, but initially he is a little hesitant. It turns out that while I was preparing my questions the night before, he was worrying about what they might be. So when my first inquiry touches on his friend Ed’s reluctance to finish what he started so long ago, he says he is going to “dodge” the question and talk about his visit the week before to the site of the very first Grand Designs episode.</p><p>I have recently watched it. McCloud, zipped-fleeced, leather-trousered and slightly better thatched, introduces us to a couple called Tim and Jules who are building a house on a cliff in East Sussex. They have children from previous relationships but, in what will become one of the programme’s tropes, Jules is pregnant. However, their new house was bought from a modular home company, a shortcut that the programme would regard as infra dig today, and at one point in the episode McCloud helps gild the kitchen wall with rub-on “gold”, betraying a trace of the hands-on DIY makeover shows big in the Nineties.</p><div><div><div></div></div></div><div><div><div><div><div><div><img src="https://www.thetimes.com/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F2e84a2b2-a65d-4921-9f9e-5792a43ba639.jpg?crop=4500%2C2994%2C0%2C0" /></div></div></div><div><div><div><div>McCloud with his self-built shed in Watchet, Somerset, in 2019</div><div>ALAMY</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>In other ways the first programme is remarkably what, nearly 200 episodes on, it remains. At its core lies the tension between fantastical visions and McCloud’s almost passive-aggressive realism about budgets and completion dates. “The first trick of house building is, don’t be optimistic,” he warns in 1999, having shown us the mud bath upon which Tim and Jules’s dreams must build.</p><p>“But that mud bath is now this idyllic Eden in the middle of which the building sits,” he insists. “Going back made me realise that at the point when we leave a project and tell these stories, which are all about the process, we create a sense of finality about the job being done. But it’s never done, because snagging turns into maintenance and people add and change, altering it as they change.”</p><p>Yet he still asks them about their budgets, and exceeding them. Few of us dare ask the same about our friends’ bathroom extensions.</p><p>“I say, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m going to ask you some questions about money. It’s really boring, but this is what people want to know.’ ”</p><p>Is there sometimes fibbing involved?</p><div><div><div></div></div></div><div><div><div><div><div><div><img src="https://www.thetimes.com/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F0e2eb8be-c39e-4a25-ac61-77d4484069e6.jpg?crop=1124%2C625%2C239%2C81" /></div></div></div><div><div><div><div>McCloud on a childhood family outing</div><div>CHANNEL 4/KEVIN MCCLOUD</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>“There has to be. But it’s not open-book accounting. I can’t say, ‘You can’t have done that for £35,000. What — £1,500 a square metre? You’re joking. I’ve been doing this job for 40 years. That’s impossible.’ But also there’s no doubt that in the case of someone like Ed, if he told me he’d done it for sixpence, I’d believe him, because every bit of wood I’m looking at is salvaged or from here.”</p><p>So when, I say, taking the opportunity to return to the Waghorns, he asked Ed all those years ago about a completion date, was that to add jeopardy?</p><p>“It’s not a word I like, but there’s always a natural scepticism. In this case it wasn’t budgetary jeopardy and time wasn’t the issue. It was actually about whether Ed was going to be able to grow his skill set and complete it without running out of energy.”</p><p>He used to tell people they needed a plan. These days, I notice, he veers towards the philosophy of another early couple, Martin and Sue, who would eventually spend 20 years renovating two Devonshire barns. Sue (who died recently) meditated to arrive at design ideas.</p><p>“I know. I sort of scoffed in the original film as a young man when she told me she had a spiritual companion she meditated with, but she said the important thing is to focus on the things that have made you happy in life. Put those into your building, rather than thinking about the things you think might make you happy: the new sofa, the hot-water tap that does sparkling water, the walk-in fridge that makes snow. All that is nonsense compared with, say, reading a book in the sunshine or a view of hills — the things that really reach right into your soul. Those are what you should try to put into your home.”</p><div><div><div></div></div></div><p>But 20 years! On the projects he has undertaken in his own homes, does he have a sense of urgency?</p><div><div><div><div><div><div><img src="https://www.thetimes.com/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F79cafb2e-23ae-4bff-b7d7-316ea2f49e6d.jpg?crop=2011%2C2700%2C0%2C0" /></div></div></div><div><div><div><div><div>“‘Bifold doors? Lovely — if you have a house on an island in Greece”</div><div>TOM JACKSON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE</div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>“I don’t have a huge sense of urgency in anything. I’m very slow.”</p><p>Are there clocks in his house?</p><p>“Since you mention it, there aren’t.”</p><p>Let us grab that detail. Over the past quarter century, McCloud has largely managed to avoid revealing where his own architectural tastes lie, what an ideal McCloud home would look like. There are no World of Interiors or Hello! magazine photo spreads that allow us to inspect his living rooms. Nor has he ever responded to journalists’ inquiries about his private life, which appears to consist of long periods of home building and assimilation followed by major emotional disruption.</p><div><div><div></div></div></div><p>For 23 years he was married to the interior designer Suzanna (Zani) McCloud, with whom he had a boy and a girl (having already had a boy and a girl from previous relationships). In about 2019, however, they split up and he left their 500-year-old farmhouse in Somerset and three years later married Jenny Jones, a businesswoman. Planning documents that made it into the press reveal he now lives in a 400-year-old grade II listed building (in Herefordshire), whose “lost dignity and historic character” he is restoring. It is, he has said, “a bit of a new build, a bit of an old build, a bit of a garden build and a bit of a barn conversion”, which sounds like one juicy Grand Designs episode.</p><p>He understands people’s interest in these personal matters because, as he says, Grand Designs is always searching for the “human story” within the architectural one. On more than one occasion I have looked on with grim fascination at an obsessive man, locked into his vision, unchallenged by a partner who tolerates far too many years of roughing it.</p><div><div><div><div><div><div><img src="https://www.thetimes.com/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Faf7c60bc-9117-432d-9d62-af98e04edaec.jpg?crop=5000%2C3529%2C0%2C0" /></div></div></div><div><div><div><div>Assessing an environmentally friendly housing scheme in Swindon in a 2011 episode of Grand Designs</div><div>CHANNEL 4</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>Has he seen women bullied by their partners into going along with them?</p><p>“Oh yeah, there’s no doubt about that. And, indeed, occasionally the husband or the male partner being bullied into it.”</p><p>The programme has recorded divorces. Were they connected to the anguish of building?</p><p>“Inasmuch as the process of doing it properly is one that can lead to a lot of tension in a relationship. And if there are weaknesses there, which may not be tested in any other way, they are tested through the house build. Consequently, I think you need to be pretty sure of your relationship before you embark on this.”</p><p>His own childhood was built on the foundations of his parents’ solid marriage. They brought him up, the eldest of three boys, in the three-pubbed village of Toddington in Bedfordshire, whose streets displayed a zoo of architectural styles: Victorian, Twenties, Forties and Fifties. His mother worked in accounts and ended up running a social services department. His father was an electrical engineer who bought the family home from a bankrupt builder and finished it himself. When Kevin approached his full 6ft 3in and needed a bigger bed, Donald McCloud extended his bedroom into the stairwell. He was a practical man, not an aesthete, and Kevin inherited his belief that how things work matters more than what they look like.</p><p>He was additionally bequeathed his parents’ Methodism, politically liberal but a touch austere and thrifty. He has recently hex-keyed together an Ikea kitchen in his new home. “I mean,” he says, “I do feel profligate sometimes, but the sense of profligacy is part of an austere nature. There’s the decadence hit followed immediately by the terrible sense of crushing guilt.”</p><p>He was not athletic as a boy. He was tall, gangly and clever, quite enough to get him bullied, physically and verbally, at his grammar school turned comprehensive. I wonder whether it is because he was an outsider at school that he has such empathy for the outlier homebuilders of Grand Designs. Instead, he says that there is a “nonconformism” in Methodism he is “very comfortable with”.</p><div><div><div><div><div><div><img src="https://www.thetimes.com/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2Fb2db7d51-e4e4-436c-a0e8-8c98228d2a7a.jpg?crop=2700%2C1800%2C0%2C0" /></div></div></div><div><div><div><div>In the Waghorns’ house. “My job is a bit like being a therapist, both in terms of holding the viewer’s hand but also listening to people’s stories”</div><div>TOM JACKSON FOR THE TIMES MAGAZINE</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>And his own architectural tastes?</p><p>“I realised a long while ago that my taste was changing and had changed, and therefore was liable to change and therefore is unreliable, and that my taste wasn’t the same as other people’s, and therefore by deduction everybody’s taste is unreliable.”</p><p>Is it true he refuses to do any more “glass boxes” on Grand Designs?</p><p>“No, I don’t refuse to. It’s just that if you say, ‘We’re going to film a couple on the side of a Herefordshire hill building an enormous eco home with a big glass window,’ I’ll say, ‘We’ve done that. Where do we go next?’ Having filmed a number of glass boxes, or black boxes, or white Miesian villas [as in the Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe], I’d come to the door and sort of go, ‘Oh yeah.’ ”</p><p>He is rumoured to detest bifold patio doors. “I don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with a bifold door. If you have a house on an island in Greece, perhaps, it would be a lovely thing to put in. But in our climate there’s nothing a brisk walk in the fresh air can’t sort out and, if it’s possible, sit outside and eat for those four days of the year when it’s warm enough in the evening to do that.</p><p>“People put these things in and they talk about the ‘outside in’ and the ‘inside out’, and every time I see someone open one of those huge doors or huge sliding roofs, it is like being outside. Half a tonne of leaves fall into the kitchen when the wind blows and a sparrow flies in and poos on the floor.”</p><p>So join the sparrow outside? Don’t invite the sparrow into your house?</p><p>“Personally, I’m of the view that we belong out there a lot more. My job involves standing outside all the time. At weekends I tend to get a little cabin feverish if I’m indoors for more than a few hours.”</p><div><div><div><div><div><div><img src="https://www.thetimes.com/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F4be5b164-a6ef-4aa9-8215-236c1876a4f0.jpg?crop=1511%2C962%2C0%2C0" /></div></div></div><div><div><div><div>In 2001, McCloud helped a couple construct a 6,000 piece prefab house they bought over the internet</div><div>CHANNEL 4</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>And what of kitchen islands, that obstructive fad?</p><p>“How interesting. I have just taken a centre island out. I kind of think islands are for people who want to leave society.”</p><p>No man is an island?</p><p>“And yet so many want to be and somehow the kitchen island has become sort of symbolic. If you can’t go and buy a real island, then put a centre one up in your kitchen. So instead we’ve got a peninsula, like a breakfast bar. Two people either side of it can talk to each other. It’s a very social thing.”</p><p>In an interview conducted last year by the design journalist Matt Gibberd on his Modern House podcast, McCloud’s eldest daughter, Grace (whom he calls Gracie), the former managing editor of World of Interiors, accused him of living now in more of a “white box” than ever before. He replied, quite strenuously, that he was no minimalist and that his house was cluttered with objects from his life including the bestselling Gracie lamp, named after her, from his own lighting design company.</p><p>“She was just trying to throw a landmine into the conversation. I think within all of us, as we get old, there is that desire for renewal and wanting to feel young and fresh and somehow part of the modern age, but by the same token there is an enormous comfort to be derived from the objects and the possessions that have become part of our story and without which our story would be meaner and rather more superficial.</p><p>“When you’re in your thirties, there’s no time for anything other than childcare and, if you’re lucky, sleeping. And that’s it. At my age, you can go back and make connections, just look back and try to make sense of the paths you trod and the relationships you made along the way.”</p><p>And how does he cope with regrets?</p><p>“Well, you cope with them. You simply reflect on them. And I think to do so is extremely healthy, to be able to, one, not make similar mistakes and, two, going forwards, not shut off parts of your life but be able to live with them and live peaceably with them.”</p><div><div><div><div></div></div><div></div></div></div><p>He has found therapy helpful?</p><p>“Yes. I think many people have.</p><p>“The road less travelled is wiggly,” he adds gnomically, but actually his life is full of roads taken and abandoned, and I am not even thinking of his private life. From school he won a place to study languages at Cambridge, but first he went to Italy to work at an organic vineyard and fell in love with the country. Rather than return, he enrolled at a music conservatorio in Florence to become a singer, a career he might have followed had his father not written him a serious letter imploring him to take up the Cambridge offer. There he studied languages, then changed to philosophy and went on to do a two-year course in architectural history.</p><p>McCloud had “showed off” a bit in drama productions at school, but in the Cambridge Footlights he was firmly of the tech crew, training a spotlight on Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Tony Slattery, who performed under the direction of the impressionist Jan Ravens, whom he was dating. On leaving, he worked as a theatre designer, but the pay was poor. In the Nineties, when it was fashionable to shop physically till you dropped figuratively, retailers including Joseph and Harrods’ Food Hall asked him to bring some theatrical magic to their stores, and they paid better. He set up the McCloud Lighting company, which at its height employed 26 people, but a recession arrived and the BBC invited him to guest-present Homefront, a makeover show. His ambition to perform was reignited. Grand Designs followed.</p><p>He is wary about conceding that the show and its variations (Grand Designs: The Streets, Grand Designs Abroad etc) have changed Britons’ attitude to what constitutes a home. The only trend with which he identifies is “in a boring way, the green agenda, or sustainability in its wider sense: community, sociability, environment performance, footprint, resource use”.</p><p>The truth is that the British self-build less than people in mainland Europe or the US. I imagine some potential builders might be put off by the muddy crises his series records and by the planning wrangles it hints at. According to his new book, Grand Designs at 25, one grand designer in Kent took a year off to concentrate on wangling planning permission. Another, in the Peak District, sought consent for seven years before it was conceded the proposed building would actually “enhance the setting”. McCloud blames the planners’ tardiness and their propensity to reject new ideas (easier than revising them) on cuts to local authority planning departments. “I have every sympathy for planners. I have a belief that the planning system is correct. It’s just a simple case of lack of resources and understaffing.”</p><p>And so, finally, to the other thing (beside his domestic affairs) I have been told not to ask about: the story of his firm Hab Housing, begun in 2006 with the noble aim of “building homes that make people happy”. It would make a mega episode of Grand Designs — but it would not end in the customary triumph. By 2016 Hab, an acronym for happiness, architecture and beauty, had built 120 houses on two sites in Swindon and Stroud but had run into financial difficulties. A dispute with Hab Land, a non-related business under separate ownership which partnered with Hab Housing, delayed completions elsewhere. Hab Housing had broken records for equity crowdfunding but, by the end of the last decade, some investors feared they would lose most of what they had invested. When, I ask, will he be able to speak about all this?</p><div><div><div><div><div><div><img src="https://www.thetimes.com/imageserver/image/%2Fmethode%2Ftimes%2Fprod%2Fweb%2Fbin%2F1c764a57-aaeb-4d12-a17d-16f3c92c4873.jpg?crop=1536%2C1003%2C0%2C0" /></div></div></div><div><div><div><div>McCloud in an episode from the second series at a property in Devon</div><div>CHANNEL 4</div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p>“I do talk about it occasionally. It’s just that a lot of people lost a lot of money, myself included, and there are areas of the company’s activities that are still unresolved, but which will slowly resolve themselves over the years. That, therefore, leads me to think that one day I’ll be able to talk more fully about it.”</p><p>A project for hundreds of homes for key workers in Bristol, which he started but could not see through, has gone ahead, he says, albeit without him. “I read about projects winning awards and I think the work we were doing was so good. Even now, nearly 20 years on from when we started, there are schemes coming forward from other developers that I really admire and which are exploring the same ideas. We didn’t fail. We just didn’t have deep enough pockets to keep going.</p><p>“I’m not a business person. I think that’s a huge lesson I learnt out of that project. It has meant that I’ve had to carry on working and will continue to have to carry on working.</p><p>“Development can be a highly aggressive business, one that isn’t naturally suited to my temperament. I’m able to wear the personality of a business person and I’ve enjoyed my time in business — and in Hab. But if I weren’t making television, I’d probably have become a teacher. Or a farmer.”</p><p>So, another 25 years of Grand Designs?</p><p>“Another 25 years. But that is no hardship because I love what I do,” he says.</p><p>Which is fortunate, because so many of us also love what he does; love the dreams, the setbacks, the jeopardy, the final reveals, the voice of the educated sceptic so readily awed. Grand Designs cannot run long enough.</p><p><b>Grand Designs</b><b> returns to Channel 4 next month. </b><b>Grand Designs at 25</b><b> (White Lion Publishing, £28) is out on September 5. Order from </b><a href="https://timesbookshop.co.uk/grand-designs-at-25-9781836001331/?utm_source=timesandsundaytimes&utm_medium=online&utm_campaign=weekly"><b>timesbookshop.co.uk</b></a><b>. To stay at the DugOut at Ed and Rowena Waghorn’s earth house in Herefordshire, visit </b><a href="https://lifeonthehill.co.uk/"><b>lifeonthehill.co.uk</b></a></p></span></div></div><div><span>PROMOTED CONTENT</span><div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div><div></div></div></div>]]></description><pubDate>Fri, 30 Aug 2024 23:01:00 GMT</pubDate><link><![CDATA[https://www.thetimes.com/magazines/the-times-magazine/article/grand-designs-kevin-mccloud-interview-fgs875csm]]></link><dc:creator><![CDATA[]]></dc:creator><title><![CDATA[Grand Designs’ Kevin McCloud: Yes, people fib about the money]]></title><guid isPermaLink="true"><![CDATA[https://www.thetimes.com/magazines/the-times-magazine/article/grand-designs-kevin-mccloud-interview-fgs875csm]]></guid></item>