Channel 4's Grand Designs celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2024 and at the helm over all those years, through all those series has been legendary TV presenter Kevin McCloud.

The show first aired all the way back in 1999, and a quarter-century and nearly 200 episodes later, Grand Designs continues to inspire countless individuals to pursue their dreams of creating the perfect home.

A special 25th anniversary episode of Grand Designs aired in September, while a new series of the Channel 4 show is underway.

Amid the anniversary celebrations I sat down and spoke with Kevin McCloud about Grand Designs, its success and what he's seen in his 25 years on the show.

Q&A with Grand Designs legend Kevin McCloud

Question: When you started Grand Designs back in 1999 did you ever think that it was going to last for as long as it has?

Kevin McCloud (KM): "No, of course not. Television is such an oh, it's such a little infant industry, and it's so full of doubt, self doubt and fear of failure.

"And we all thought it was going to, kind of just last for one series. You can't ever predict the success of something.

"I'm always fascinated by this, that (the success of) Game of Thrones. Who knew? You know what I mean.

"George Lucas, when he did Star Wars, right, made it on a budget. Without Gerry Anderson and Thunderbirds and all the technology and techniques, puppetry and model making that were in the UK at the time doing science fiction.

"You look at the Star Wars and Space 1999, which was like two years beforehand, it was the same technology, the same design, same models, even.

"And George Lucas, you know, made the thing (Star Wars). Everybody thought it would be a stupid, little, silly science fiction thing. Nobody had heard of these directors or the stars.

"And then look what happens, now there's a whole Disney world, a whole universe.

Kevin McCloud buried a time capsule at the Grand Designs Live event at NEC Birmingham to celebrate 25 years of the Channel 4 show.Kevin McCloud buried a time capsule at the Grand Designs Live event at NEC Birmingham to celebrate 25 years of the Channel 4 show. (Image: SMD Photography/Grand Designs Live) "I kind of think it's an unknown and I'm just very grateful because its managed to sustain me all this time."

Q:  What would you say is the key to the success of Grand Designs and for it running for 25 years?

KM: "I think it's like anything actually that becomes a stalwart, is that you - and I suspect is the same if you look at the plot lines of Coronation Street - that you can't take anything for granted.

"You don't take success for granted, and you just keep trying to remake what you do and do it in a fresh way with fresh talent, work with great people, collaborate with great people, use the best editors you can find.

"Not sit on your laurels. Never slack. I think there's always been a kind of sense, it's like having an itch, a bit of an irritation. You think 'if only we could do this again' and always trying to drive it forward and change things and find new projects.

"We will not do projects that we've done before, if it's literally 'oh yeah, this reminds me of what we did back in 2012', okay, is there any point of difference? Is it such that it gives us a completely new slant and feeling to this film, and if so, then maybe we'll do it.

"But otherwise, no, we won't. So we don't repeat ourselves, if we can help it at all."

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Q: So, apart from something that hasn't been done before, does a property/project have to meet a certain criteria to appear on Grand Designs?

KM: "I think there has to be something about it which is strong and perhaps not quite run of the mill, and, we like it when people push.

"And I don't mean at the budget, I mean, you know inventively, imaginatively with ideas.

"I like it when architects design and build their own homes, because they're terrified.

"With interior designs, the stakes seem less. So if the interior design is wrong in their home, they can repeat something.  

"With architect you can't repeat anything, because the building always has to be a different in a different place, and they're doing it for themselves.

"They've got no money nearly all the time. So that's great. So already, you're got a great start. I always like it if we can film an architect or two in every series doing their own thing, because you just get it, you get the real deal, it's really close to the knuckle.

"We're going back, actually, to revisit the little pink house in North London that we did last year, that we did last in the series, and that's now finished, and that's going to be so good.

"I'm so looking forward to getting back because of Graham, who's the architect who lives there and who designed it, kind of through the entire film, he had this kind of this veil of terror. 

"I think he's a bit more relaxed now because the house is built, he can smile, and it would be lovely to go back and see him.

"So there has to be something. The word grand in the title, refers to the imagination. It doesn't refer to the size of the budget, or even the size of the building, actually."

Q: Is that one of the perks of the job for you, being able to go back and see the finished project?

KM: "It's a huge perk. And I don't get mud all over my nice clothes and I have somewhere to shelter from the rain.

"It's really important because architecture is there to allow us to flourish. Without it we just shrivel up, we get soggy and die and so it's there to provide us with shelter and warmth and comfort.

"Allow us to enjoy views, maybe just lift us physically up into the air and enjoy a bit more landscape, or a borrowed landscape.

"And to make us connect better to place and to community and to other people.

"That's its role. Buildings are there to look after us and the moment you have the finished building and you can go in it and shelter from the rain, it's like 'wow, it's doing its job, and it's dry in here, and it's not raining through the roof anymore'.

Kevin McCloud has been host of Grand Designs since it first aired on Channel 4 back in 1999.Kevin McCloud has been host of Grand Designs since it first aired on Channel 4 back in 1999. (Image: SMD Photography/Grand Designs Live) "So, I'm sort of joking, but I'm sort of not, because it's so fundamental to what buildings are and, and it's a novelty, of course, going back to a finished project and and seeing people enjoy it.

"I mean the great thing, of course, is going back after a few years, and then you see how people have changed. And after 25 years.

"We revisit the first project in this series, the first project we ever filmed. My first day on Grand Designs was on this project.

"We started filming in (19)97 I think and there was a baby who was born halfway through, called Tiger and he's now a published author.

"So I interview him in the film and it's like, okay, you've written children's books and you run this forest school, and you've planted 15 acres of forest.

"The house now sits, not on a hill, but in a forest, and the House has grown, and yet, bizarrely, the house is in amazingly, internally, it's exactly the same - it's the same furniture, the same colour scheme. They've just repainted the odd wall, that's it. But the house is exactly the same. 

"They've grown up, the owners - Tim and Jules, they still seem the same, albeit, you know, they're 27 years older and meanwhile their son, Tiger, and their daughters have grown up, and they're running the hang gliding business and just to see that.

"When I went back to the very first social housing scheme we did, which was a hedgehog housing Co Op from series one, I went back in 2013 and all the kids had grown up.

"They were kids from families from really, really desperate housing conditions. Where it was really threatened, really difficult for so many in the household.

"They were on the social housing list and in temporary accommodation. They were building their own and each other's houses. The houses were beautiful.

"The kids all grew up, you know, it the shared facilities and shared gardens and orchards and stuff. And they're all, when I went along in 2013, doing, like, media courses and going to university, going on their gap year - the kind of thing that you just hoped they might do.

"It was a lovely, beautiful thing. And no doubt, now there maybe some of those kids living with their parents back in on the scheme. I don't know. But I should go back because it's been 20/25 years or so. 

"So I think the point about the revisit is, if you go back six months later, it's a bit pointless. If you go back a year later, it's interesting.

"If you go back 25 years later, it's fascinating to see how human beings grow, change and flourish in these buildings."

Q: I know you've seen lots and lots of builds/projects during your 25 years on Grand Designs, but are there any, you can remember, that stand out for you? One that was over the top amazing, and another that maybe wasn't so grand where the owners fell short of their expectations.

KM: "Here you lead me to one project which I'd really like to talk about which is called Chesil House or The Lighthouse on the North Devon coast.

Kevin McCloud talks about the mixed emotions of Chesil House - labelled by some fans of the show as the 'saddest ever' Grand Designs home.Kevin McCloud talks about the mixed emotions of Chesil House - labelled by some fans as the 'saddest ever' Grand Designs home. (Image: Savills) "The reason I mentioned it is they were both (good and bad) in one project.

"So we go, and this comes back to the revisit, we filmed the project over, what, six years, and, you know, it's a disaster.

"Ed's marriage falls apart, at one point his daughters are very distraught, and it's all hugely risky.

"He borrows enormously and in the end he can't sell the other property he's built and they've demolished the old family house, and he's had to resort to third party investment, and he's sort of losing the project.

"We get to the end of that film and the things unfinished, and it's a disaster. And my final piece to camera was all about the hubris of overreaching, overextending - human vanity of thinking we can do everything, but we can't.

"If you try too hard and you just pushed too large, you may just fail and it was the most epic example of that.

"Then we go back for the revisit, and he's refinanced and, yes, he's given up control of the project but it still is to run, and he's finished it, and it's done, and it's on the market. 

"He and his ex wife, they're now divorced but they're really good friends again. And the family, the girls, feel entirely at one with the project, and there's a sense of reconciliation and of peace really, and of learning and of humility.

"So if the first project was about hubris, the second one is about that idea of reconciliation.

"So you get out of defeat, sometimes you can find the scraps of success, if not victory.

"It kind of taught me that any project can be it can be a success, it can be a failure. It can be a failure in so many ways - in personal terms, in relationship terms that we might not know about, in financial terms, but it can be a success creatively and vice versa.

"You could have a tremendously financially successful, viable project that's come in on budget and all the rest of it, but actually artistically, it's artistically, it's a disaster.

"So I'm fascinated by the fact that on a project we might travel through every single human emotion.

"We don't know when they're coming, we don't know what's going to happen.

"And it isn't the fact that they've run out of money. It's not the fact that roofs falling in it's their reaction to that, the way that humans deal with that, their emotional journey that we need to chart.

"And that's why AI will never take over my job. I think."

Q: You spoke about hubris, but is there one particularly annoyance or pet peeve of yours that comes up regularly on Grand Designs where you think 'oh no, not this again'? 

KM: "It's size. It's the size thing where people think 'I've got the money so I've got to build something big'.

"Why don't you build it slightly smaller and make it more beautiful? Why do you make it more sustainable, zero energy, or even, actually energy positive? Why don't you just save some money, put it somewhere else and build a smaller house? Because you don't need that big.

"But when people do build large houses, they don't know what to do with them anyway. They sit in the corner of this giant room they put the telly on, or their on their mobile phones.

"They're in this digital, virtual space which lives inside this machine, right?

"Not the real world, not the real space. They're just wandering around the room going 'I like that corner'. No, they're on their bl***y phone all the time.

"And then they put in more bathrooms than they will ever use, a massive cost and it's nuts.

"So I say to all of my contributors, and everybody laughs when I say it, but it's true, that they could go live in a hotel for a night, or go live in their caravan for another night, and I would shrink the house by 25% overnight and they would come in the next day and they would not notice."

Q: Moving away from Grand Designs a little bit, what would your top tips be for renovating a property on a budget?

KM: "Well, I'm going to say insulate, insulate and insulate.

"Because, I think insulating your loft pays for itself within two weeks, basically.

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"So it would be foolish if you were going to extend the kitchen or do the attic conversion, it would be foolish to skip because you've got an opportunity to not only insulate that space, but also to retrofit perhaps other spaces in the building.

"That seems to me to be an essential thing, and right now, with energy prices being what they are, it seems to me to be more compelling than ever to do that.

"But I would say, I come back to this thing about space does not equal size.

"So if you have an opportunity to make a connection to the sky through a skylight, doesn't matter whether it's over a shower or in a bedroom for you to lie under the ease of your roof and look up through and see the passing clouds and planes and look at the stars at night, or whether it's through a huge sliding thing in your dining room.

"That opportunity to find connection to the universe, to the, not the world, but actually the air above your head, that, to me is, it's quite romantic and, and I would always personally want to do that, to have that connection, because that way you can just marvel at the universe.

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"Storage - built in storage is a wonderful thing. Floor to ceiling storage is a wonderful thing. You can hide a load of stuff, and the room doesn't seem that much smaller, and yet all this clutter disappears.

"So I'm a big fan of storage, a big fan of properly integrated, well designed storage. And that's not expensive to do, that's a few sheets of MDF."

Q: One last question before we wrap things up - there are so many different property and design shows out there now, if there was another show that you could be on, apart from Grand Designs, what would it be and why?

KM: "I would like to spend a day on set with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and his Channel 4 series (Outrageous Homes), which is just hilarious, where he goes and looks at extraordinary, eccentric homes in the UK.

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"Joel Golby in The Guardian wrote a lovely review of it.

"Only in the UK could you make that thing where the house is eccentric, but the people sort of aren't, despite their purple hair, and where Laurence kind of enters into the spirit of something and sort of almost over shadows the owners.

"It's a brilliant sort of way in which you kind of examine the sort of thing, what the English try to be on the weekend."

Kevin McCloud was speaking ahead of Grand Designs Live at NEC Birmingham, the UK’s premier home and design exhibition, which is taking place from October 2 to 6.