Kevin McCloud on his new Ikea kitchen & the home renovations worth doing
Very proud of building his own new Ikea kitchen in his Herefordshire home, and still keen to learn new skills, TV’s best-known architecture and design guru, Kevin McCloud, 64, shares with House Beautiful a few clever design hacks to save money, recommends the must-have renovations to do this year and talks about the value of using an architect for any home improvement project.
We've heard you've installed a new kitchen from Ikea...
KMC: I’m a fan of design and a fan of Scandinavian design particularly. Ikea is a retailer who have a fantastic sustainability record. I can't fault what they do. It comes with a 25-year guarantee too, so it’s pretty robust. Having looked around the market I thought, 'Yes, I’ll do this myself, we’ll see what it turns out like'. I wanted to build it myself to save some money. Literally I screwed together cabinets. I’m quite practical and I really enjoy picking up skills to be able to hack something and alter it.
Any hacks to share?
KMC: I bought an expensive tap and I bought a Dekton worktop to go with it from Cosentino, which is an amazing material. And they’re an amazing sustainable company. Their entire factory is powered on renewable energy – it’s all electric ovens and they make ceramics out of waste materials. The story of it is so interesting and the product itself is so durable.
I’m all for buying something, hacking it, making it look slightly different and then putting a really expensive overcoat on it, which is what I did. You live and learn, don’t you, on how to doll something up?
What else do you like for your own house?
KMC: My house also has some beautiful stuff from beautiful makers and craftspeople. I don’t live entirely in one world from one retailer, or even one maker. In fact, an hour ago, I went to the cupboard and took out a pot made by Colin Gorry [a 20th century British ceramicist] – a pot I’ve had for over 40 years. It’s the idea that you go through life and things travel with you.
What are your guiding principles when it comes to decorating your own home, or planning a more ambitious renovation project, such as adding an extension?
KMC: One of the things I first remember learning 40 years ago – before I wrote my first book on design [Kevin McCloud’s Decorating Book, published in 1990] – was the idea of how important it is to follow your heart. In a way to be idiosyncratic, not to be too fashionable, to do your thing, and not to worry about what people will think, or what will sell.
I’ve seen this over and again on television over all the years we’ve been filming Grand Designs, which is now 25 years. When people do something a little bit idiosyncratic or unusual and sometimes a little bit eccentric, and when they do that with total conviction, it’s brilliant. It’s only if you falter, it’s only if you do things half-heartedly, don’t be certain at it, don’t do it with passion, that it turns out a bit 'oh dear, that’s a bit sad'.
It’s such a lesson in life. Whatever you do, if you do it with passion and conviction, and you research it and you go for it, you really go for it, it will be over and above and beyond fashion. It will simply reflect who you are you and you will love it. Other people may not love it, but it’s not theirs, it’s your home.
Can you think of projects with passion that really stand out for you?
KMC: Pretty much every single great country house in the UK has got some weirdly eccentric pink room, or a blue room or a ballroom painted bright yellow or something. Whatever it is, you think, 'that’s nuts', but it's been done with such passion, and quite a lot of money.
There’s loads of examples of this kind of passion, whether it’s Lord Dashwood painting his drawing room bright blue [at West Wycombe Park, Buckinghamshire] when he came back from the Grand Tour, or on television [Grand Designs in 2015], there was James Strangeways who wanted a very small house, half boat, half house, down by the river in East Sussex. His nephew [architect] Ben Hebblethwaite designed it for him. James is always wanting to make changes, he’s wanting to add a crow’s nest now. It was a really, really beautiful small home, designed perfectly for one person.
If you look on Pinterest, or at Grand Designs magazine or House Beautiful magazine, if you find those places which are odd or unusual, they’re the ones that arrest your memory. The perfectly composed shot, with no animals in it, or cables dangling from table lamps, with no objects, no personal effects, nothing, they’re the sterile shots. The places that are really interesting are those that are bristling with the personality of the people who live there.
When it comes to home renovations, big or small, what's worth doing this year?
KMC: I think this year as summer approaches, if it’s going to be like last year, or the year before, anything that provides cool and shade. That can be so many things: awnings, gazebos, an outdoor deck area for an outdoor living opportunity with some shade, or planting a deciduous tree in front of your house so you get summer shade and winter light.
Keep your rooms, as well as you, hydrated so that humidity can have a cooling effect on the skin. I’ve talked about this at Grand Designs Live, some very simple ideas like wetting down your stone steps or a balcony, or putting a clay pot in an open window full of water, so that the water evaporates through the clay and cools the air coming into the building. It’s a process called evaporative cooling – it’s how air conditioning works but you can achieve it much more simply.
There are lots of tech ideas and lots of simple ideas for keeping sun out of a building, whether it’s a complicated brise soleil, or building a gazebo outside your kitchen which provides shade, and that can be as low tech or as high tech as you want it to be.
Also, there are some really interesting technologies where people have taken solar panels and paired them up to a ground source heat pump and got it to work backwards, so it takes heat out of the house and into the ground to store for the winter.
Grand Designs has been held responsible for the huge popularity of bifold doors. Are they still the answer to everything?
KMC: Like anything, they’re not the answer to everything. They’re simply bifold doors and they fold away, and I’ve seen amazing systems that fold away into a cupboard and suddenly it’s like a wall’s disappeared for the half a dozen days a year you want to do that. They’re great at letting the outside in and letting the inside out, and basically allowing your interior to fill up with leaves.
Some people love them and some people do not. I’m also a fan of the big single sheet of sliding glass because you have less interruption to the view. The other thing about bifolds is getting a system which allows you all the views and functions and isn’t draughty, that is super airtight, that’s hard to get. But if you love bifolds and think they’re going to change your life, go for it.
What value can an architect bring to a renovation project?
KMC: If you employ an architect to help you remodel your home, add an extension or whatever it is, you’ll get back what you paid for in terms of their fee. You’ll get it back in terms of resolution, in terms of a better design, in terms of the happiness and the energy and the joy the building will have as a result. You don’t get any nasty shock details, you get this beautifully shared, thought-out, really considered result.
Grand Designs Live, the premier home exhibition, is at London ExCel, 4th May – 12th May 2024. Visit granddesignslive.com for more information.
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