Television’s most beloved architecture showcase is back on our screens tonight. The brand-new series of Grand Designs returns with a striking collection of self-build projects and the stories of the people determined to make them happen.
Kicking off tonight at 9pm on Channel 4 and continuing every Wednesday, the new run will feature 4 new builds and 2 revisits. Presenter Kevin McCloud will also be appearing on The One Show this evening to discuss what viewers can expect from the upcoming episodes.
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This series features twin houses designed to resemble one enormous pink cloud, a radical computer designed suburban home built for simplicity, a driving test centre transformed over a decade and a high tech, highly sustainable surf house. Twenty years on, the series also revisits a traditional mill reinvented with a stark modern interior.
Reflecting on the longevity of the show and its influence over the past 27 years, McCloud addressed whether the programme has reshaped British homebuilding.
“It is very chicken and egg, what came first? I think the great thing about television is that it can reflect society, and i think television is at its best when it is able to do that and hold a mirror up and say, this is us now. Channel 4 are very good at doing this, i think it is one of the most compelling things about the channel,” McCloud said.
“Grand Designs has been going forever, and so the question is whether it holds a mirror up and i believe the answer is yes, it does so because we have no real formula. We find projects in the real world and we observe, that is it. Grand Designs strengths and its longevity are down to the fact it doesn’t really have a format other than that. It has a beginning and a conclusion, but what happens in the middle is not up to us, it is up to the people who are building. We, of course, go out of our way to find interesting and challenging projects that are more at the margins, that show us where we might be as a society in 5,10, 20 years time, not just where we are now. So, my short answer is possibly, but it is much more important for us to show examples of stuff which show the rest of society how we might be building and living in the future.”
When asked if homebuilders are still capable of surprising him after nearly three decades, the presenter admitted he is continuously caught off guard.
“All the time. I thought in series one we might run out of projects. We thought that we had done an eco-project, a modern white block, a glass house, we did the eccentric thing. We thought, will people still tune in if we do another glass box? But the answer is yes, because from the beginning we set ourselves the challenge that in every episode there has to be something new – there has to be some story, some angles, something, a hook. Luckily, since architecture is so much about place and response to a place and so much about people and response to people and because places are so infinitely diverse, people are infinitely diverse, this is what makes every project and what keeps me on my toes every time,” he explained.
“If you look at this coming series, every single project has something unique about it and i find that so fascinating, all of the individual narratives are so different. The houses are all so unique architecturally and in the way they are built.”
McCloud believes the key factor behind the program’s enduring popularity is its inherent spontaneity.
“I think it is the unpredictability of it all. If we were restoring people’s homes for them, then we might have slipped into a predictable format but we haven’t. Some of the projects on this series are fascinatingly unpredictable. For example, we see Seb in North-West London, building a house which was completed in 13 months and i was so shocked because i am used to things taking forever. We also have a project in Edinburgh, which has been going for over 10 years, and when you look at the date stamps as we go through the programme, you sort of appreciate how some people dedicate a lot of their lives to a building.”
Several builds stand out to McCloud this season for their innovation and sheer craftsmanship.
“All the builds stick with me in some way. I saw how incredibly elegant and beautiful timber houses can be. We saw a home be made from cross-laminated timber from machines in Austria and it came and quite literally slotted together, it was magical – like watching a piece of origami happen before us,” he recalled.
“Peter and Emily are building a pink cloud house in Kentish Town, it is not very often you see one of those. In East Edinburgh, there they are doing amazing things and the whole building is being crafted like a piece of furniture, as he is a woodworker, so even though brick or concrete is not his natural material, he is crafting everything. But i think what always sticks with me is how resourceful human beings are and how creative we can be and how the craftmanship in the building works out. There is a powerful truth in each project that there are well made things in a world where things are increasingly made so badly, including houses.”
Climate change and extreme weather adaptations are also central themes in the upcoming episodes.
“Increasingly we are filming projects which, thank goodness, take into account the issues of overheating as well as the issues of wider warming and insulation. So, we are seeing more houses fitted with overhangs to keep the sun in the summer off the building or people using timber construction, using wood fibre insulation which is very effective at keeping you warm in winter but better than plastic insulation at keeping you cool in summer,” McCloud noted.
“People are also using a lot of thermal mass. One of the revisits this series, which is going to be fascinating, is built by an engineer whose speciality is low carbon buildings. He built a house in concrete that was buried in the ground without any insulation around the building. What he did was place a lot of earth on top and around the building and insulate that. The building then collects by an underfloor network of pipes, collects heat in the surrounding soil and the walls during the summer and uses it in the winter. All of the data i have seen so far about the building is so compelling that he is effectively able to create a building that has the same temperature during the winter and the summer. What he is doing is radical, and it is hard for the rest of us to go and buy or build one of these, but this is an approach to building that is hugely important.”
When asked what modern techniques he would take back to the show’s origins, McCloud pointed out that sustainability has always been in the show’s DNA.
“Timber construction, air tightness, passive house standards – which there were in series one, it was just not known or publicised. The thing I am quite proud of showcasing throughout the years are buildings that are super low energy, which are beautiful at the same time. We sort of did start with a few of these things, as in series one was a timber building that was super insulated, as well as an eco-home, built entirely from imported engineered timber. So we were, in a way, already there.”
Ultimately, it is the ongoing cultural impact of architecture that sustains McCloud’s enthusiasm after all these years.
“Jack Pringle, who chairs the RIBA trustees, took me on the tour of RIBA recently as they are redoing the building to make it publicly accessible. That was really intriguing and i asked him why they were remodelling the building to make it so public and he said because architecture is a huge conversation and it will never stop. It is one we all have a part to play and everyone has a right to enter that conversation and be a part of it,” McCloud shared.
“I thought that is a really interesting idea, he then followed by saying that of course, the thing about architecture is that we all live in it, we work in it, we constantly move through it, it is what always surrounds us. That i find is a slightly sobering thought, given the poor quality of so much housing in this country, but it explains” why the drive to design better spaces remains so essential.
With its distinctive mix of compelling storytelling, architectural ambition and an honest look at the realities of creating a bespoke home, Grand Designs continues to show what it really takes to build a house around the way you want to live.
Grand Designs airs tonight at 9pm on Channel 4.
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