'Quality is almost a dirty word in government now'

More than just a Channel 4 pin-up, the real Kevin McCloud is private, principled and with a political axe to grind, as Adam White discovers on the eve of Grand Designs Live

- Adam White

Kevin McCloud, gentle king of TV house builds and comfy winter fleeces, won't tell me what he can't stand about modern homes. "That's the whole issue of taste," the Grand Designs presenter says, in that reassuringly sonorous voice of his. "Yours is not mine, and mine is not yours.” Yes, Kevin McCloud, but surely there’s something. What about my personal bugbear: the pervasive colour drainage afflicting interiors across the land, which has been dubbed “the grey plague”, “sad beige” or even “millennial beige”? McCloud won’t bite. “What did beige ever do to you that it should be vilified in such a way?” the 65-yearold shoots back.

OK, I tell him, we can avoid specifics. He ums and ahs. “I suppose I don’t like ideas which are superficial,” he says. It’s the designer in him. “When, for instance, you make a new chair, there’s a huge weight of responsibility. There are thousands of chair designs out there and only a handful are any good. There’s no point designing a chair if you can’t make it better than a Hans Wegner 1945 chair, or a Charles and Ray Eames desk chair, and anybody who’s designing stuff that doesn’t meet that threshold should stop designing. We should not have that product on the planet.” He looks a bit taken aback by the force of his words. “That’s quite a fascist idea, isn’t it?”

For a man who’s more or less been the warm, stoic face of Channel 4 factual entertainment since 1999, when