Kevin McCloud

Kevin McCloud admits to living and breathing all things architecture. Having built, designed and written about buildings for the entirety of his career, Kevin’s diverse skillsets know no bounds. He champions issues such as context, the historic environment and the implementation of sustainable construction, and has been a columnist for The Sunday Times. Kevin also writes for Grand Designs magazine.

He believes that the best design – whether traditional or radically modern – relates to context: landscape, place and neighbouring buildings. This is a philosophy developed through the work of his development company Hab, founded in 2006, which is now building homes and facilitating communities towards a One Planet Living way of life.

His television work, including the series ‘Grand Designs’, ‘Demolition’, his five year television project about the regeneration of Castleford, broadcast in 2008, and ‘Don’t Look Down’ for the BBC, has always revolved around the built environment. He admits to having an unhealthy obsession for buildings since childhood.  In addition, he also wrote and presented his four-hour ‘Grand Tour of Europe’ in 2009 and spent two and a half weeks in the slums of Mumbai for Channel 4’s 2010 India season.

In 2019, Kevin wrote and presented Grand Designs: The Street, which followed ten households as they embarked on an epic five-year community project to construct their own homes as part of Britain’s biggest self-build project at Graven Hill in Bicester. He has also fronted four series of Grand Designs: House of the Year, a joyous series in which he visits cutting-edge new homes across the country, all in the running for the prestigious RIBA House of the Year award.

When not filming, Kevin writes and occasionally still designs products. He has designed lighting for some of the finest buildings in Europe, including Ely Cathedral and Edinburgh Castle, as well as contemporary ranges of consumer product for British retailers and manufacturers. His books cover subjects as diverse as construction, architecture, colour, lighting and, in 2010, the impending culture change that a sustainable future will inevitably demand.

Mainly for getting rid of the capital ‘A’ from architecture, Kevin was awarded two honorary doctorates in 2005, from Plymouth and Oxford Brookes. He has patroned several architectural and sustainable charities, been a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Foresters, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a WWF Ambassador.

Some of Kevin’s previous clients include The Northwest Property Awards, The Manchester Evening News Awards, and The Edinburgh Quatermile Launch.