Kevin McCloud answers your questions about building, filming and upskilling the next generation

What would you recommend installing to make your home more sustainable?

Helen, North West

Insulation. It doesn’t matter what the insulation is. You can put it in the most disgusting petrochemical insulation ever invented but it will probably pay for itself within ten days.

What was the first thing you did to redesign your first property?

Mary-Grace, East of England

The first house I lived in was a two-up, two-down, so we couldn’t do much with it and we didn’t have any money. So I remember it had an Artex ceiling in the kitchen, which was foul. And so rather than try and rip it off, the builder said it was easy to batten over it and stick another ceiling underneath it. To this day, it probably still has two ceilings.

Then we put trendy cork tiling down, and I tiled over the kitchen worktop with some ceramic tiles. It was more of a rehash and resurfacing of the building. All the old stuff was still underneath, including that really tacky 70s kitchen.

Is there any retro style that you’d like to see make a comeback?

Mark, London

I’d really like to see modernism come back. Brutalism, is an evolution of that same idea. I’m all for a bit of rigour and architecture and design that reflects the time we’re in.

Am I interested in seeing new fourteenth-century plague pit architecture and design? No. Not really. Do I want to see the eighteenth-century – a century of cholera and bad dentistry – in my interiors? No. I want to feel that I’m living in the modern age. I want to feel that I’m living in a sustainable 21st-century world.

What are the biggest changes you’ve noticed over the years running the show?

Peter, London

Architecture is so slow that by the time you’ve been through planning and got the thing built, whatever you thought might have been fashionable then is now not. So forget it.

What I’ve noticed over the past 25 years, as we came into this century, is a change from a point where we were almost trying to reproduce and regurgitate the twentieth century, in the early years, trying to figure out what this new language would be in building and design.

What has happened is that we’ve started revisiting the buildings of the 1970s. I see that emerging more and more with soft forms, curves and arches and use of softer materials. We’re seeing more organic forms with sustainability, with highly insulated buildings, a huge amount of timber, a huge amount of engineered timber, glulam beams, Parallam beams, all kinds of structural timber that’s replacing steel and concrete, as well as straightforward walls.

And I think that’s devoutly to be wished. It feels to me as though our language for this century is going to be a far more sensitive one, a far less material-intensive one, one that is more sustainable and more gentle and a little bit more rounded.

Why are modern houses low quality?

Norman, Wales

Modern houses are really low quality in the UK because we have a delivery system based on the principle of delivering very large profits to shareholders. It’s almost the only country in Europe where volume housing places profits above quality.

It stems from ideas grown in the 1980s in politics about ownership and treating our homes as assets, as investments for shareholders and as well as for homeowners, as opposed to treating housing as a social good, a foundation of civilisation.

The UN describes housing as a basic human right, not a commodity. So I think the problem in the UK is treating our housing essentially as commoditised objects, which we buy and sell and make money on and therefore build as cheaply as possible.

It’s a complicated landscape and it’s not easy to fix at all. But if you look at other European models, they’re far more diverse. There’s much more choice of tenure, of typology, of mixing the social and the private, of model and architectural style, of greater choice of builder. You can, if you’re living in Austria, choose probably from three important, good local builders in the town where you live, and you’ll be building a house probably made out of the forest that’s over there on the mountain.

Who has been most influential in your career?

Sheila, South East

There have been so many kind and helpful people. None of us get through life by ourselves. None of us get through life by rushing or hurrying or trying to be too independent. I think actually relying on great people and taking advice and support from them is one thing I’ve learned reluctantly over my life.

I say reluctantly because when I was much younger, I was independent and determined. I thought I could do everything. I soon realised you just don’t and can’t.