THE future is a glorious unknown for Grand Designs host Kevin McCloud, pic left. And that's just the way he prefers it.
"I never imagined I'd be doing this. I'd never planned it. I don't even plan what I'm doing next year. But I must say, it's a very good place," he says.
It's also a rather busy place. The author, designer and writer and presenter of the hit BBC television show Grand Designs, now in its 10th season, has written a new book, a manifesto on how we could live. And he pops up, effortlessly charming, on our television screens frequently.
He's also put his money where his mouth is and has designed and is building a 43-home sustainable project on the outskirts of Wiltshire (mid global financial crisis). "It's like putting your head above the parapet as far as the UK press is concerned."
Yet, it could have all been so terribly different. McCloud could so easily have been a little Aussie Kevin. McCloud's parents were all packed up with transit papers and visas ready to move to Australia in 1958 when his mother realised she was pregnant (with Kevin) and they stayed put. So Kevin McCloud, the Cambridge-educated Englishman who combines stout good sense and an eye for elegant engineering, did not end up an Australian tradie.
"I was nearly an Australian. My uncle did migrate and so I have Australian cousins and I have a brother down there. I'll be down there next year for Grand Designs Live in Sydney and can't wait," he says, speaking from a hotel room in London.
The son of an engineer, he and his brothers were raised in a house his parents built.
McCloud, 52, first went into theatre design and then ran his own lighting design business, before starting in television. Grand Designs became a cult hit, as McCloud made people tackling highly ambitious homes - which often look like logistical nightmares - seem not insane nor self-absorbed nor naïve but wonderfully heroic.
"Their struggle to pull off this great adventure is a drama and building a house is drama we can relate to."
The unusual architectural projects filmed often take years. "I sometimes end up a counsellor," he says.
The production team is sometimes filming up to 15 building sites at a time. People send in their projects. If it is overly excessive or has nothing exemplary about it architecturally or does not have high sustainable benchmarks, it is not considered. McCloud says he never wanted to produce cynical television.
He believes the global financial crisis has changed home design in the UK, even at the top of the market.
When not in a hard-hat on Grand Designs shoots or exploring India in the two-part Slumming It program (recently shown on the ABC), McCloud lives "organically" in a 500-year-old farmhouse in Somerset with his wife and children, and has a small farm.
In it, McCloud suggests we stop lighting our gardens, abandon the formal dining room and get rid of all downlights. He outlines what are not worth spending money on: expensive kitchen cupboards, fancy stoves and those power-showers.
And what is worth spending money on? Things you touch - taps, handles, chairs, kitchen worktops, table lamps and everything in the bathroom.
Throughout the book, McCloud echoes the maxim from 19th-century writer and craftsman William Morris. If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.
Full review of Kevin McCloud's 43 Principles of Home: Enjoying Life in the 21st Century (HarperCollins) at Brisbane's Courier Mail.
No comments:
Post a Comment