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‘Other cultures celebrate the elderly. So why do we consign them to beige farms that smell of cabbage and wee?’: Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen on Changing Rooms, retirement living and growing old disgracefully

Toby Keel Toby Keel

30 years after finding worldwide fame as TV's most flamboyant interior designer, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen has a new mission: to turn retirement villages into places more like boutique hotels than 'oatmeal coffins'.

‘It was all a massive surprise,’ says Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen. ‘I was coerced into doing a screen test. I hated every minute of it.’

These aren’t the words you expect of a man who became one of the most well-known people on television in at the tail-end of the 1990s, yet in LLB’s lively, sardonic tones they ring true. He’s telling the story of how he came to appear on what was then a new show, and indeed a new idea in broadcasting: real people being filmed, unscripted, as they had a room in their house torn up, reimagined and re-done, with their permission, but behind their backs.

The perpetrator was usually a friend or neighbour, working in tandem with an interior designer. And if the interior designer that week was Llewelyn-Bowen — back then a long-haired, leather clad fop looking like a a refugee from a Bon Jovi tribute band — the chances are that it the end result would be an eye-popping explosion of colour and design.  Sometimes it went well; sometimes it went badly; most of the time, viewers had to guess just how genuine the victims were as they professed to love what had been done to their bedroom…

Changing Rooms, needless to say, was a smash.

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Sometimes literally.

All of those involved became household names, but Llewelyn-Bowen in particular has had a long-lasting television career that now spans 28 years, and an interior design career that goes back even further.

‘I was very interested in interiors as a child. Everyone is. Every child is,’ he tells Country Life’s podcast host James Fisher.

‘Every child wants to define their own space within the family unit. And these days, and I see this very much with my grandchildren, they’re using the latest licensed characters. In my day back in the 60s, 70s, it was about, I want that wallpaper, I want that colour.’

After a spell studying fine arts at Camberwell College of Arts, and a few years working in rubber flooring — yes, really — LLB (as he’s usually known) started getting design jobs here and there through his wife, Jackie, who was forging a hugely successful career in planning weddings.

‘She had the most phenomenal black book,’ he says. ‘And she’d call me in to design or decorate a marquee or something like that. And then one of her clients would go, Oh, could you do my sunroom or do my plane or something? So I literally just plopped into interior design, just flopped into it.’

It was also Jackie who was responsible for that ‘coercion’ in putting Laurence forward to audition for the Changing Rooms, which was theoretically based on the cookery show Ready Steady Cook. ‘I was dragged into doing it,’ he adds. ‘I was bored… and couldn’t wait to get out, which, of course, made me the most attractive proposition for them.

‘They actually rang me up and said, “Oh, your name’s ridiculous. No one’s ever going to remember your name. You look stupid. Who’s going to wear velvet and leather? And you were haughty. And you didn’t talk to anyone. You’re perfect!”‘

Jackie and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen at the Shooting Star Children’s Hospices Ball in 2021. (Photo by Jeff Spicer/Getty Images)

LLB now believes that the producer behind the show, Sir Peter Bazalgette, had actually gone about, ‘casting Changing Rooms, like it was a Carry On film,’ with Handy Andy effectively Sid James, Carol Smilie as Hattie Jacques and Llewelyn-Bowen as Kenneth Williams.

‘And that’s what made it fun,’ says LLB. ‘We were entertainment with emulsion. And quite weirdly and accidentally, it ignited in the public imagination.’

The designer-turned-TV star ended up travelling the world, getting recognised everywhere from Purley to Peru, and clearly having an enormous amount of fun with it — with his nonchalance still part of the chemistry.

‘If there’s any model to ever follow for a television career, I think it is that,’ he says. ‘Spend 20 years trying to get sacked from it. And that will guarantee that they’ll never let you go.’

At home with LLB: Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen photographed at home, circa 1998, for TV Times magazine. Credit: Future Publishing

That sense of fun — and the flamboyant dress sense — is still there today, and as he approaches his 60th birthday, Llewelyn-Bowen has brought it to his latest project: designing retirement villages for Rangeford, and he’s on a mission to reimagine retirement homes as ‘somewhere that you can go as a retiree that’s not like an oatmeal coffin’.

‘They sent me a release saying they want you to “rebrand retirement” and “it’s time to embrace growing old disgracefully”, which I love as a sentence,’ he says — and clearly as a concept too.

‘I’d love for there to be finally someone that’s producing somewhere that you can go as a retiree that’s not like an oatmeal coffin,’ he says. ‘That’s not all about actually keeping the colours quiet because you don’t want to overstimulate granny. That actually feels as if it’s a boutique hotel.

‘For me as a sixty-year-old, and for my generation, we’ve been all over the world and we’ve done all these kind of things. We know what Soho Farmhouse feels like. Why on earth would we want to just slide into this very nondescript oatmeal environment just to wait to die? Actually, we want to be as juicy as possible for as long as possible.’

There’s a serious element here: as he points out, ‘most other cultures celebrate the elderly… So why is it in this country we put our old people out of the way, encase them in these environments that smell of cabbage and wee, and allow them to sort of degenerate?

‘In Britain, for some reason, we have decided to consign what could be an incredibly valuable resource, which is, you know, old people, into these kind of beige farms where they’re just supposed to just gently disintegrate,’ he says.

‘You know that entropy is inescapable. You are going to get older and less good at a lot of things. But also there’s something at the back of your head which is going, but also that doesn’t mean I’m going to be not viable.’

Llewelyn-Bowen is evidently embracing this philosophy in how own life. The family home in the Cotswolds — which he bought after seeing it in Country Life — is divvied up for multi-generational living: ‘We’ve chopped the manor house in half so that, you know, we’ve got one family in there, daughter, husband, two grandchildren, and then built a house out of a garage block across the other side of the courtyard for other daughter, husband, and grandchildren,’ he says.

‘The place has never been fuller. I’ve got grandchildren crawling all over me 24 hours a day, practically. How the little buggers get through onto our side at about five o’clock in the morning, I have no idea. So often, I’ll wake up in the night, and there’ll be these sort of large, shiny eyes looking like the poster from Les Mis at the end of the bed, going “Guvvey, Guvvey, can we play?” And of course, they know that actually they come over to our side, and we’re going to say yes. The parents go, “Get back to bed. You’ve got school in the morning,” but we’re like, yeah, come on then. Let’s go downstairs. Let’s put on something unsuitable on the television and raid the drinks cabinet. Why not?’

Growing old disgracefully has never sounded more fun.

Listen to the full Country Life podcast with Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen and see more about Rangeford Retirement Villages here.