In amongst everything else he does – and let’s face it, he does a lot: he is by turns a menswear designer, entrepreneur, factory owner, TV presenter, and something of a well-groomed pin-up for some women (and probably a few men) – Patrick Grant tells me he is renovating a farmstead in Yorkshire. Because obviously when you’re already running five businesses you need something to fill all those long hours you have spare.

“At some point you start to realise that you need to put a bit of balance in your life,” Grant explains as we sit over tea and shortbread in the Blythswood Square Hotel in Glasgow. “I had a cottage in the Cotswolds which I had with my ex-girlfriend and when we broke up I sold her my half and since then I just miss having a place in the countryside.

“I have a factory in Blackburn and I’m up there typically three or four days a month and at the moment I stay in the Premier Inn and I eat at Wetherspoon and I’d like to have a place.”

And so, Edinburgh-born Grant, who you will know from the BBC series The Great British Sewing Bee or, if you are a man of suitable means, from his Savile Row tailors Norton & Sons, has invested in a grade 2-listed farmstead consisting of six buildings located on the edge of the Yorkshire Dales National Park. It will require extensive work, but then he’s well used to that.

“Part of the plan for the farm is to turn the milking shed into a craft studio,” he says, enjoying talking about the prospect, “set up a pottery wheel and get back to doing some of that stuff.

“I’ve been filming a series for Channel 4 over the summer where I’ve got to do loads of amazing craft stuff,” he continues, wiping shortbread crumbs from his bearded lips, “so I’ve learnt how to turn wooden bowls on a medieval lathe and I’ve learnt how to paint canal boats decoratively and I did a bit of pottery and it’s just been really fun.”

You may have noticed that filming a Channel 4 series is itself another job. Add that to Norton & Sons, his high-end menswear label E.Tautz, his essentials line Community Clothing, launched with Kickstarter funding last year, the Blackburn factory Cookson & Clegg which he bought a couple of years ago and the label Hammond & Co he oversees for Debenhams (which is the reason he’s in Glasgow this afternoon), and it is obvious Grant has rather heavily weighted his work-life balance away from the life end of the seesaw.

“I could do with something to take my mind off work every now and then,” he admits, “because I’ve had 13 years of doing this now and it’s all been work.”

Hmm. You might feel a little sorrier for him if Grant didn’t start another business every time he turns around. And if he had least had the decency to look a bit haggard at the workload.

But no, here he is, 45 years old and looking well on it. (“It definitely doesn’t feel young,” he protests.) Grant is tall, handsome and today pimped out in his £165 Hammond & Son suit. At £165 it’s a mere snip on what a suit in his Savile Row shop would cost you (where prices start at £4500), but he makes it look good.

That might be just down to the fact that he’s tall and handsome and would make anything look good of course. But he prefers to think it’s down to the cut and the fabric and the attention to detail.

“We use less expensive fabrics, but we make uncomplicated clothes, so all of the money goes into the fabrics and the construction,” he says, the salesman in him taking over. “It’s still a beautiful looking cloth. It’s got interest. It’s got a bit of life to it.”

Give him the chance and he will talk knowledgeably and lovingly about clothes; about where to place the button, about concealed fastenings, about proportions and cuts. The businessman is also a fashion lover.

But then he always was. Born in 1972, he grew up in Morningside and as soon as he was old enough (and tall enough) he’d raid his father’s wardrobe and borrow the bespoke suits therein. As a teenager in Edinburgh he’d browse the racks in Corniche and wait for the sale to buy “little bits of Gaultier.”

On the face of it, this might not square with the knowledge that the teenage Grant was also a rugby-playing engineering student. “Yes, studying engineering and loving fashion; the Venn diagram has a very scant overlap,” he concedes. “The walls of my room at school were covered with pictures from Elle and Vogue and most of my friends had Bon Jovi.”

In fact, he only made the move into the fashion trade when, as an MBA student at Oxford, he saw an advert in the Financial Times offering a business for sale. That was Norton & Sons. Some of us might see risks in a business that was struggling. But Grant saw opportunities.

“All I thought was it sounds incredibly cool and I can’t not do this. This sounds like all the things I love in life rolled up into one thing – beautiful clothes, incredible history and extraordinary craftmanship – and I genuinely didn’t consider the risks of it. And I think most people who start business do it not with any thought of making or losing money, but because it sounds like something they can’t not do.”

That was 12 years ago. It took a while to turn the business around (not helped by the fact that Grant kept starting new ones, he admits). But Norton & Sons is back on its feet now. It is a luxury business that makes 250 suits a year. It is, Grant says, a very settled business.

Is its owner though? There was a time there when Grant was winning Menswear Designer awards and being seen around London with the aforementioned ex-girlfriend, the accessories designer Katie Hillier. Today, though, he is talking about wanting to live in the countryside where he can cycle and walk in the hills. Hence the farmstead.

But then maybe this is a good time to have a bolthole if you’re in business. There’s a storm coming, after all. Hurricane Brexit.

Having spent a lot of time over the last couple of years at the factory in Blackburn, Grant says he wasn’t surprised by the result of the referendum last year. In British cities, he suggests, “it feels like the world is getting better. You go 30 miles north of Manchester to Burnley and Blackburn and it feels completely the opposite.

“It’s certainly no surprise to me that there are huge amounts of people who are very p**** off with the status quo. There are huge swathes of the country that have been left behind by industrial policy. They’ve been hung out to dry.”

What will Brexit mean for his businesses? The drop in the value of the pound has already had an impact, he says. “All the stuff that we buy from outside the UK just got a damn sight more expensive. So, we buy our denim from America, we buy our shirt cotton from Italy, all the raw wool comes from Australia and that’s all bought in dollars and that is more expensive. We’re selling more, but we’re making less money on everything we sell.”

This is small beer, though. The real problem will come, he argues, if we leave the single market. “It’s probably going to be pretty bad for sales. Because people can’t be arsed with the bother. Right now, business is very straightforward. If we want to buy a sip from Italy we phone them up, they stick it in an envelope and it arrives the next day.

“Fast forward 18 months we might have to fill in 12 pages of customs declarations every time we buy a zip. And every time anyone wants to buy something from us, they’ll have to clear it through customs, which means pages and pages of documentation. They probably haven’t even got anyone in their team with the expertise to do all this stuff which probably means we’ll have to do it for them. We don’t have those people, so we’ll have to pay somebody, which means somebody else will get the boot … I mean, yeah, it’s tough.”

For the first time this afternoon, Grant sounds a little ruffled.

“I think it’s been very poorly thought through and I think it’s only starting to dawn on people what the actual realities of doing business are.

“There was a vote, but leaving the single market and the customs union wasn’t what we voted on and I think that bit is incredibly dangerous for business.”

It’s hard to dress that up. Even for Patrick Grant.

Clothes in the Hammond & Co. by Patrick Grant range are available in Debenhams stores.