Kevin McCloud has spent his professional career at the forefront of modern construction and design. But as the spaces we inhabit and the products we consume become ever more complex and mass produced, he wonders if it’s actually costing us something profound: our individuality, our sense of creative fun, our freedom to invent.
In this series, Kevin explores whether what really makes us happy is creativity and simplicity. So he’s going and building his very own haven away from the world of uniform relentless mass production – a structure he can point to and proudly say “I built that”. He wants to recapture the pleasure of what he thinks many of us have lost: making things with our own hands. The project is fulfilling his boyhood dream of a place he can escape to, somewhere that’s all his own. Kevin’s haven will be a customised “convertible” shed which, over four episodes, he’ll fill with incredible objects of his own making. Building it will be a caper from start to finish, pushing Kev out of his comfort zone to craft his Shed of Dreams.
At the end of the experiment he’ll be in a position to answer the question constantly nagging away at him: Is simple better? And he’ll have created a unique, if somewhat leftfield palace of self-indulgence for himself that is totally powered off-grid.
In episode 4 of Kevin McCloud’s Man Made Home an old gas cylinder was converted into a wood burner to heat the hot tub. We would like to make clear that converting gas cylinders in this way can be highly dangerous and can also be unlawful. It should therefore never be attempted by you under any circumstances.