Interior designer and TV presenter Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen first hit our screens with Changing Rooms. Famed for his flamboyant personality, attire and designs, Laurence cut a swath through drab homes around Britain, revealing to an eager audience how they too could have a home worthy of a V&A display.
Aside from Changing Rooms, which ran for 17 seasons in its original format from 1996 to 2004, Laurence has appeared in various television shows, including Who Do You Think You Are? and The Apartment. His latest venture is Outrageous Homes with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen on Channel 4.
Laurence, 59, is married to Jackie, a wedding planner and author. The couple, who have two daughters and four grandchildren, live near Cirencester in Gloucestershire.
Where do you live?
We live in the Cotswolds, which is difficult to capture given it typically conjures up beige stretchy waistband trousers or pine storage. We have a seven-bed 17th-century farmhouse, with a cottage, and when I say we, I mean literally “we”.
That would be Jackie, me, our two daughters and their husbands, and then the five-aside football team of grandchildren, of which we have four so someone has to step up. I suppose we live in a homestead. We’ve taken the L-shaped house and made distinct areas.
It’s like the Waltons in the Cotswolds, and people are surprised, asking whether we’re a cult and when Tom Cruise is going to turn up.
Where did the idea stem from?
I suppose it partly came about as a result of the lockdown. Jackie and I were rattling around the place like two very decorative dried peas in a huge tin, and our children were finding it difficult to find somewhere nice to live. The thought occurred that this is exactly how people lived until the 20th century.
Back then and now, in other parts of the world, they don’t have old people on the other side of the country pining to see their grandchildren, whose parents can’t afford childcare.
What attracted you to the house?
We moved in 2007 from a lovely house in Greenwich. Both of us had only ever lived in London, but Jackie had always said it’s vulgar to live in a town past 40, so we intended to move to the country.
I never saw our house as I was filming in India and Jackie found it, loved it and I just said go ahead and buy it.
What’s it like?
It doesn’t feel quite like a Cotswold house, it’s a bit Mediterranean, L-shaped, and with the original 16th-century farmhouse and garden. Hermione has the wing, which was put on in 1640 and is rather grand. Jackie still hisses to people that she has been forced to live in a two-up, two-down.
This is true, but it’s a pretty two-up, two-down, with a ballroom. Yes, I am taking the 16th century into the 21st century via the 19th century, with a nod to William Morris.
What is the style you’ve gone for?
I’m not into this modernist idea that every room should have beige colours. Bollocks to that. I think each room should be a completely different experience. You should be able to wander about your house like it’s “Around the World in Eighty Days”, which everyone had until the 20th century.
You had a Pompeian dining room and a Moorish smoking room, and we’re very much like that. I use our house as an aesthetic laboratory. Our bedroom has a coral theme, you could be in Italy, France, or Mauritius. It is deliberately celebratory of being away on holiday.
The dining room is a Cotswold Fantazia, a Disney explosion of flowers, and our drawing room is a fabulous evocation of the 1980s. Swags and tails, Joan Collins would feel very at home there if she turned up for a Cinzano.
Do you entertain much in your ballroom?
No, funny enough. We find so much of our time is sucked up with family business. Jackie is pretty much a full-time mamma mia with the grandchildren.
There is something a little Italian about our enormous lunches on the terraces.
How do you relax?
Jackie and I have hit this wonderfully, unapologetic old-person incarnation, where we sit in front of the television watching Netflix. My big discovery of recent years has been a nest of tables. I’d never seen them in my life, but you can buy them and it’s like travelling first class on an aeroplane.
You have a little tray, and there you are watching aliens or pyramids or whatever in ultimate comfort.
I can’t believe you never came across nests of tables on Changing Rooms.
I saw them, I just didn’t understand what they were for. I just thought, “Oh my god, how weird, these tables have had children and they’re all huddled together”.
I never understood the liberating joy you can get from them.
Do you have any other properties?
We’ve had a place in Port Isaac, Cornwall since 1990, which runs against type given I am property averse. I quite liked it that the burden was also divided when we split our home.
As a designer, can you switch off at home?
No, and I’m fine with that.
Even if we’re sitting there with our tray tables watching Britain’s Got Talent, I am looking at Amanda Holden’s dress and the way the theatre’s decorated, and if all that bores me I have a whole library behind me.
What’s next for you?
Outrageous Homes is all about meeting people who don’t want to fit into any sense of orthodoxy, which I think is incredibly refreshing.
We’ve been bombarded with property shows about value or needs-driven makeovers. This is different – fabulous eccentrics who want to live as 14th-century vampires or Japanese cartoon characters.
Outrageous Homes with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen starts on Thursday 20th June 2024 on Channel 4.
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