Grand Designs’ Kevin McCloud names 3 fave ever builds - but wouldn't live in any (2025)

EXCLUSIVE: Grand Design has been influencing the style of British houses since 1999 and while host Kevin McCloud has been front and centre for these beautiful builds, he wouldn't want to live in them

Not all Grand Designs are created equal. For guru Kevin McCloud, three builds stand out from the rest but he's adamant – he wouldn't want to live in any of them.

The property renovation show is now in its 26th season, which is on air at the time of writing, meaning Bedfordshire-born McCloud has seen up close scores of stunning houses and ambitious visionaries.

For him though, three projects stand out.

“One of my favourite projects was Patrick Bradley's, which was the four shipping containers in Northern Ireland, on his family farm. And it’s about his family, it’s about his sisters and his parents running the dairy farm and Paddy helping as a young architect working out of the garage.

“And he builds this house out of four shipping containers very cheaply on the land and his mum is worried about whether she's going to like it. His mum then becomes a character in the story and at one point I say to her, ‘Anne, don’t look at the camera because they’re not here, they’ve evaporated.’

“And she says, ‘ok, ok,’ and she turns to camera and she says ‘All I want for my darling son, is a lovely wife.’ It was very funny, we all started laughing because she’s broken the rules and she’d made this national plea on television for a daughter in law. It gets in the film and low and behold in South London there’s a girl from South Africa watching in Wimbledon on the sofa with her friend who just says ‘there’s your husband there, that guy’.

“Fast forward two years and Patrick and she are married and they now have babies and are living in the house.

“It was almost prophesying, and I love that because we've got Grand Designs babies now. It’s a lovely thing that we’re there for the long form.”

The other was Ben Law’s in 2003," he said. "It wasn’t beautiful just because it was a beautiful building but it was about sustainability – Ben only used that word once and I didn’t even mention it – it was a very elegant film about how you build green, because it just showed you, it was coherent.”

The third in his personal favourites pile, however, is one that has recently aired.

“It’s a revisit to a pink house in North London in a street of Victorian houses – yellow brick, white details, white front doors, white bunting on the street, tree-lined, very polite, very middle class," he said adding it was the build of a "scottish architect who lectures and teaches and his wife who is a german designer.

“It’s on the site of two garages and is a tiny twin house, one house slipped forwards, one house slipped back… everything is clad in this pink cement board, everything is beautifully crafted and put on, it’s like a human heart in architectural form, two ventricles.

“What’s most poignant about this is she has a daughter and he has a daughter and they met at a wedding and they had both been recently bereaved, so both daughters had lost a parent and they came together as this blended family, fell in love.

"The two daughters now live in one house with them and the two ventricles of the heart represent both the families and also the love that envelops them – and as buildings envelope us, I found it irresistible as a poetic idea.

“If you said to me can a building represent love and express love I’d have struggled to say yes, but I’m now convinced it can.”

But no matter how much Kevin may love these builds, he says he doesn’t want to live in them.

“I used to, in the first couple of series I thought ‘oh I could live here, I’ve got a bit of living room envy, bit of view envy, whatever it is.’

“Then I realised your home is where your heart is, I get to visit these places but I’m borrowing that view, I’m borrowing that house for a day or so.

"And, in two weeks time there's another house to go and borrow. I don’t have envy – I’ll pick ideas up, as we all do, get influenced by stuff – but no, home is where we all want to head, and so we should, and this is someone else’s home that represents who they are, it’s someone else’s biography. It’s fun and it’s right to just borrow and enjoy, it’s a lost art.

“You don’t need to own everything you experience.”

Grand Designs Live at London's ExCel runs from May 2 to May 5.