By Phil Scullion Follow philscullion
Grand Designs Live. We are excited. The show, sponsored by Direct Line, kicks off on 5 May and runs to 13 May.
And seeing as the whole thing is based on the Channel 4 series, we thought we best have a quick chat with design guru and Grand Designs presenter Kevin McCloud:
What are you most looking forward to ahead of Grand Designs Live?
Well there’s a lot of new stuff – I’m my own show’s best customer!
It’s an opportunity for me to catch up with what’s going on, but also a chance to catch up with my customers. When I was in business I used to have lots of customers and pretty much knew them all – I don’t know them now because television is a one-way communication. It’s good to meet people.
If you could live in any famous building in the world which would it be?
That’s a really good question because I’m not sure I’d want to live in a famous building! The idea of a famous building suggests that you’re going to have a queue of people looking round and I value my privacy too much.
I suppose there are a lot of good buildings that I would fight tooth and nail to save and I would feel very sad about losing, St Paul’s Cathedral is one of them but I couldn’t ever live in it of course!
There are some amazing small palaces and country houses designed by Andrea Palladio in Northern Italy where I’ve slept and stayed and thought to myself ‘this is a wonderful building and I’d like to spend more time here’.
In a way I’m quite lucky as I get to spend a lot of time in great buildings anyway, whether they’re brand new homes or whether they’re historical buildings and the great privilege of filming is that we have the place to ourselves.
Stepping beyond the red rope and filming in interiors and touching the marble tops, sitting in the chairs, it’s a great privilege to be able to do that.
There are many places which you think this is a fine place to be in and a fine place to live, ultimately of course they are someone else’s, they’re testaments to other human beings, which is what makes them interesting.
What kind of features do you think are most important to people?
Funnily enough the things that matter to people often end up not being the things that we think matter. If I said to you six bedroom house, swimming pool, triple garage, you’d probably think ‘great’, but in the end they’re not the things that matter.
Most people like a hot shower, a comfortable bed, a warm floor to put their feet on when they get out of bed, maybe a view of the sunset or a lake, perhaps water is important to them. These things are quite abstract and achievable on very little money as much as they’re achievable on a lot of money.
To live in the country with the sound of a brook is quite a modest ambition but in the end those are the ambitions which people really harbour.
Most people in London do not have the ultimate ambition of living in Notting Hill even though that’s widely considered the most desirable place to live.
Is it difficult to balance people’s expectations?
The questions I ask when I go filming, the questions the directors like me to ask are: how big is it going to be? How do you feel about this?
That horrible question is so vague and general and doesn’t usually elicit any kind of proper response.
The questions I like to ask on camera are the ones which get under the skin of people. Finding out their motivations and what it is that matters to them in this world and drives them and makes them who they are.
I think trying to understand people’s personalities, their needs, weaknesses, strengths, loves, dislikes, I think that’s really fascinating.
Seeing human psychology at work in remarks that people make – for me that’s what makes my job really fascinating. It’s that relationship between building, person, and place. Ultimately it’s all about human expression and it reflects so many complex aspects of human beings.
What’s the oddest thing you think you could convert into a house and what are the boundaries?
I think it was Philip Johnson, the architect of American skyscrapers, who said that all architecture has the responsibility to cuddle and to exalt and that the difference between a building and a piece of architecture is that a building can be for an animal. It can have no windows and no door, it’s just a structure.
But the magic of architecture is that it will respond to where it is and it will provide an extraordinary experience and narrative. That narrative is about nurturing and protecting and nourishing human beings, making them feel good, exalting them, making them feel like better people.
The great responsibility of the architect is to provide for people.
New builds – what do you think of the direction they’re moving in and the styles?
Good, bad, mediocre and in-between. We need background buildings, of course we do, but we don’t need crap and there is too much crap.
I don’t mean cheap, I mean poorly designed, poorly thought through, poorly implemented.
There’s no excuse for that, great design costs no more than crap design. It’s all about the inventiveness of the mind really.
So how about the housing minister Grant Shapps – how do you think he’s getting on?
I like what Grant Shapps is doing with the new incentive for first-time buyers, he’s extending it across a whole range of home owning models and that has got to be a good thing. Government support for home owners and first time buyers has been absolutely crucial. We need more of that.
His initiatives with getting Britain building are also very laudable and I hope that works out.
I wish I could say that the planning policy framework is as robust and coherent. To me the government’s planning policy framework suggests a document which was drawn up pre-recession and has been artificially changed by the chancellor [George Osborne].
I detect a bit of confused middling there and it would have been a finer document had it just concentrated on the objectives of sustainable development, which it claims to.
It talks about economic drivers being the principle drivers, well actually if you look at any definition of sustainable development it’s about three triple benefits – economic, environmental, social – there’s no mention of that, it’s all about the economics. I think that’s rather crude.
The department of energy and Greg Barker have been doing sterling stuff with the Green Deal. It’s a very powerful piece of legislation which will empower people to lower their heating bills at no cost to them.
There’s fantastic potential to work together and a move towards increased sociability and inter dependence – people realise they can’t do everything themselves and they need help.
It would be nice to think that as a society we’re moving back to becoming a more sociable culture.
So that’s our Kevin McCloud interview. If it’s inspired you to head on over to Grand Designs Live next week then you will certainly want to take advantage of our discount code, available here.
Leave a Reply