Grand Designs Kevin McCloud: ‘My house is as chaotic as yours'  

When I set off to meet Kevin McCloud – the thinking woman’s Monty Don – to talk about his new book, I intended to bring along the copy his publishers sent me, so I could refer to it in depth and cross reference chapters, like the true professional I am.

All right then, so it was I could have it signed by the author and then sneakily wrap it up and give it to my husband for his birthday next month. But most inconveniently, the Grand Designs presenter’s 43 Principles of Home is big and so heavy I would have needed a taxi to carry it, like a ministerial red box, behind me as I hopped, sustainably, onto the 73 bus.

A 392-page tome weighing as much as a toddler and with a carbon footprint to rival the Aga Khan, is not, I suggest, what we would expect from a man with solar panels on his roof and a biomass boiler in his sitting room and whose green credentials are so unimpeachable you can actually buy T-shirts online featuring his face, with “Integrity” emblazoned below.

“Ah, you’ve got me there,’’ smiles McCloud, a rangey, handsomely well-preserved 51-year-old with a winning line in dry humour and unexpectedly telly-white teeth. “I did point out to the publishers that if the book weren’t illustrated we could save a forest, but they wouldn’t listen. As a property developer I learned a long time ago to choose your battles wisely and that, unfortunately, compromise is a given.”

The book is an heroic, unapologetically erudite overview of buildings and social history, electricity usage in the 1970s, the 16th-century guild system, architects, philosophers and green thinking. Benjamin Franklyn, Michaelangelo, Christopher Wren and Le Corbusier all make appearances alongside the exhortations to build houses out of old tyres and Buy Authentic.