Kevin McCloud is celebrating 25 years with Grand Designs — by popping up on Grand Designs: Australia

Grand Designs, the long-running architectural series that began back in 1999, this month celebrates its 25th anniversary in the UK — a rebooted Aussie version, with host Anthony Burke now at the helm, also arrives on the ABC.

“It’s extraordinary, really,” says the show’s original host Kevin McCloud, who is speaking with The Sunday Times from his home in the UK.

“I really am very lucky to still be doing it.”

Though he doesn’t host our version, he’s popping up this week in a one-off episode, officially “passing the baton” to Burke.

Back home, filming rolls on for the show’s 22nd season, which sees the presenter visiting the house that featured in the very first episode they filmed in the late 1990s.

The couple who originally commissioned that home are now empty-nesters.

And though they’ve made a few ad hoc additions over the years, remarkably, their home has remained relatively untouched — except for one detail.

The house now sits amid a forest.

“The owners planted some saplings — and those saplings are now 25 years old,” McCloud explains. “They now live in a forest!

“You go to the outside deck upstairs, which they have built, and you now look out over the canopy, and it’s like you’re in a forest — you actually can’t see the house (when you’re outside) because it’s covered by the trees.

“It reminds me of that old Chinese saying, you know the one: ‘They say the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago — the second best time to plant a tree is now’.”

It’s a funny thing, to mark the passing of time via a TV series. But that’s precisely what McCloud and millions of other Grand Designs fans have been doing over the two-and-a-half decades the beloved series has been on the air.

Architectural trends have come and gone but there’s always been one constant: McCloud.

He’s visited thousands of homes, sticky-beaked at thousands of designs — and heard that oft-uttered phrase, “We hope to be in by Christmas”, thousands of times.

“Ah, yes, it’s that great paradox: Christmas,” says McCloud, chuckling. “It’s one of life’s big deadlines.

“I can see why it’s important to us, because when you think of it in terms of what it actually is — a time for family to come together; of feasting and celebrating, which is what humans have always done for hundreds of thousands of years. And you can understand its importance.

“But really, in building terms — it’s a completely arbitrary deadline.”

Far from being irritated to have heard that phrase mentioned time and time again, McCloud remains as enthusiastic as ever — for him the show has never lost its shine.

“There aren’t many other people who say (they still love) what they are do after so long,” he explains.

“But it really is great and (doing Grand Designs) really is quite addictive for me.

“In lockdown, I really missed it. We stopped for about six months and then it picked up again and I felt as though — finally — I had something to do again; that I was home, as it were.

“I’m really pleased I am still doing it and am very lucky to still be doing it.”

As McCloud points out, at its heart, Grand Designs is about people — sure, ogling people’s homes is not without its merits, but it’s the human drama that makes his show so compelling.

“I was saying this to someone this morning that the series is really all about human beings — it’s about people,” he explains.

“You get these moments of intense humanity and poetry and nobility — all human emotions and experiences are there: the seven deadly sins, the lot. “

The tone is markedly more jovial in the special one-off episode McCloud features in this week — he’s off looking at several completed projects with Burke, hitting the road for an “architectural road trip” of sorts, which sees the unlikely pair travelling the east coast together in an old kombi van, visiting all sorts of incredible properties.

On Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, they’re noseying through a spectacular home that looks as though it was built without much change from $10 million.

McCloud also tours the famed Nightingale apartments in Melbourne, before the pair visit a tiny home in Sydney’s Surry Hills, a shining example of what can be done in a small space, on a small budget. The whole thing is a delight.

“You can look at these big projects, and they are sort of exemplars in their own right ... but where (architecture) really comes into its own is when you take a small site, and not much money, and try to make it truly sustainable — that is where it gets really, really interesting,” he says.

If McCloud has his way, he says he’d continue doing the show well into his old age — and the rate he’s going, that may well be the case.

A British publication recently compared him to long-running nature doco guru, Sir David Attenborough — it’s a comparison that makes sense.

Though McCloud hesitates to compare himself to that stalwart of film and television, there’s something undeniable about their immense skills in front of the camera.

“I don’t want to be David Attenborough — I don’t want his job and I couldn’t do it,” he laughs when we mention this. He’s a living legend!

“But I admire him. I admire him for what he’s done on climate change and for everything really. He’s highly gifted and a titan.

“But all I’d really like to be able to do, like him, is to keep on working.”

Grand Designs: Australia returns on Thursday at 8pm on ABC