Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen started out in TV in 1996 as the flamboyant designer on Changing Rooms, where his outlandish decor reduced more than one homeowner to tears. Llewelyn-Bowen, 61, grew up in Kensington and studied fine art at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts before starting his design consultancy in 1989. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen started out in TV in 1996 as the flamboyant designer on Changing Rooms, where his outlandish decor reduced more than one homeowner to tears.
Llewelyn-Bowen, 61, grew up in Kensington and studied fine art at Camberwell School of Art and Crafts before starting the design consultancy in 1989 that he still runs today. He is now also working on the World of Warcraft gaming feature that allows players to design their own home. Llewelyn-Bowen lives in a 17th-century manor house in the Cotswolds with his wife, Jackie, their daughters, Cecile and Hermione, and four grandchildren.
How much is in your wallet?
Nothing. I mean, nobody’s got anything in their wallet any more. I took my grandson to get kebabs on Saturday — talk about living the high life. Although, just so you know, we had a fully laid table: folded napkins, candleware, candles all lit. We might eat slummy, but we always lay posh.
Anyway, the guy said it’s cash only. I looked in my wallet and literally didn’t recognise what was in there. It turned out to be euros and a Malaysian ringgit. My wallet is full of receipts and membership cards for private members’ clubs I no longer go to. It’s perfectly useless.
Which credit cards do you use?
My banking trajectory sounds tragic. It started off with Drummonds off Trafalgar Square, where you went to see the bank manager and had a glass of sherry and there was a lot of wood panelling. Then we moved to Coutts, then to Handelsbanken, and now I’m with something called Geezer or Boozer or something. Monzo? Yes, it could be that.
It has no bank manager and no actual corporeal existence, just this unbelievably retina-churning coloured card, which isn’t a credit card. It’s the most ungentlemanly thing in the world, because you’re only allowed to spend the money that you’ve got. How am I supposed to run up tailors’ bills like the Regency fop I am if I can only spend money I’ve got?
Llewelyn-Bowen, left, with the cast of Changing Rooms: Andy Kane, Linda Barker, Carol Smillie, Graham Wynne and Anna Ryder Richardson
ALAMY
Are you a spender or saver?
I always thought I was a complete splurger, but without a credit card it turns out I’m actually quite parsimonious. It was kind of a midlife crisis when I suddenly worked out that I wasn’t a Cavalier — I was a Roundhead in Cavalier clothing. So being on the Binza Bonza thing, I do check now to see how much money I’ve got rather than just sort of blarting out, “Charge it, rub it in tissue paper, sprinkle it with rose petals and have it delivered”.
Do you have a money weakness?
Thirty, forty years ago, I had all the time in the world, all the health in the world, all the hair in the world. Then at 61 you suddenly realise that actually you are on a bit of a countdown clock. There’s a moment when you sit down with all these financial advisers and they say: we can guarantee the kind of lifestyle you’ve got for 20 years. So basically, I’ve got to die at 81 or else I’m going to be in total Jane Austen penury.
The years of splurging and “we’ll fly first class to Barbados” are long gone. I knocked off the shopping addiction in lockdown. Before then, you’d have a good lunch, then trawl through Burlington Arcade and have three of those, one of those and one of those, just because you could.
What’s been your most extravagant purchase?
I’ve always been an unbelievably, catastrophically generous present buyer. I was always very good at just deciding that what Mrs Llewelyn-Bowen needed more than anything was a new Stephen Jones Millinery hat just because it was Tuesday. My suits cost about a grand, which I still think is extremely good value. My Cotswolds tailor, Barrington Ayre in Cirencester, shimmies them up for me. This one I’m wearing today was made in 2020, I think, so it’s got a good six years on it. It may have been let out slightly — it’s terrible the way suits shrink at the dry cleaners…
What was your first job?
Being paid by a relative who worked at the American embassy to escort high-born American girls around London when I was 16 or 17. I’d take them to the cinema, to a club, they’d come back rather wide-eyed. From then, I found myself jobs: I sold rugs in Liberty, hats in Harvey Nichols, I sold Monty Don’s jewellery in Harrods before he reincarnated himself as a gardener.
At home in 1998
TV TIMES/FUTURE PUBLISHING VIA GETTY IMAGES
I trained as a fine artist and had my own design business. I spent most of the late Eighties and early Nineties doing the most extraordinarily intricate things to very wealthy ladies’ boudoirs in Knightsbridge. Then I got picked up by the BBC and foisted into television stardom, and my earnings went through the floor. You got paid virtually nothing and were put in a minicab after making the most-watched programme on BBC1, meanwhile my Lady de Snottys couldn’t bear the idea of me turning up smelling of celebrity. So I had an earnings crisis.
Are you better off than your parents?
There’s no “I was born in the gutter and dragged myself up”, I just had the most unbelievably middle-class upbringing. It was all a bit tragic in that my father died when I was nine and my mother had multiple sclerosis, but even within the confines of that, I just remember a very ordinary, happy, oatmeal childhood surrounded by furniture from John Lewis.
My father was an eminent surgeon, but was diagnosed with leukaemia and died very quickly. I don’t know how my mother managed because it was before the days of big life insurance payouts. But she was a very smart woman. We didn’t have frills like everybody else did — we didn’t have a car or really ever go on holiday — but the groceries would be delivered from Peter Jones.
We must have been unbelievably strapped for cash but it’s something that I never felt or really registered. So, yes, much, much wealthier than my parents.
Do you own a property?
Yes. I inherited a share in the house and we used that to buy our first flat in Streatham with a very small mortgage when we were about 24.
That’s when times were quite tough. I had a job in manufacturing at Harefield rubber factory and Jackie was working for Admiral Crichton, organising parties. I’d be going out at six in the morning just as she was coming home from Belgravia with armfuls of tuberoses, boxes of cigars and bottles of Courvoisier and goodness knows what.
The Llewelyn-Bowen manor house in Siddington near Cirencester
ADRIAN SHERRATT FOR THE TIMES
It was a very charming, beautiful mansion flat. I think it was about 60 grand, but we made a loss of about 10 grand when we sold it. Then we bought a very ugly bungalow in Blackheath on Shooters Hill Road for £129,000 and sold it for something ridiculous like £400,000 three years later.
We moved to a lovely house in Greenwich which we bought for about £700,000 and sold for £1.2 million. Then we moved to Gloucestershire, to our manor house. We spent less than £1.2 million on that and I think its current valuation is around the £3 million mark. We also have an apartment in Cornwall, which I think we paid £124,000 for and its current valuation is about £800,000.
We’re the last generation to be able to say that. Nobody else is going to be able to make those enormous leaps in the property market. But we were never propelled by money — we would look at a house, love it, not be sure we can afford it, and think, oh f**k it, we’ll find a way.
Do you save into a pension?
We did and we ended up cashing them in. Now we’re looking at how we can do things so we don’t end up with an enormous bill should we decide to identify as dead.
What is better for retirement — property or pension?
It’s whatever you want. I think the most important thing for retirement is to be as much you as possible. Jackie’s always said the big thing about getting older is that you’ve got to ensure you don’t stop being brave.
What’s been your most lucrative work?
It was after my Changing Rooms earning crisis, when Jackie came up with the fabulous idea of a business based on licensing, which is what we’ve been doing ever since. It would have been an easy fix to slap the LLB name and my gurning face on any product from bath mats to dandruff shampoo, but I’ve always been rather old fashioned about wanting my Licensed brand to properly reflect my design DNA. So over the last 25+ years working with companies like Next, Littlewoods or John Lewis, if it says LLB on the label then it’s spent time on my drawing board.
It’s the thing that’s put the Prada shoes on the children’s feet and paid the Marlborough school fees.
I’m quite choosy about the product alignments I get involved with because I take it as a bit of responsibility. I can remember early on being bullied by an advertising agency to get involved in a project, which I flatly turned down. I had them ringing over a weekend, literally trying to smear pounds all over me and I still said no. Everybody thought I was quite, quite mad.
I’m working with World of Warcraft now and a lot of the players watched Changing Rooms 30 years ago, so there’s something charmingly surreal about finding me there encouraging them to customise their in-game abode. It’s raised my stock immeasurably with my nine-year-old grandson and, weirdly, with Countess Bathurst, who occupies the stately home next door to us. She’s a fan of Warcraft, so now sees me in a glamorous blood elf kind of light.
• ‘I’m a hardcore gamer’ — Sheena Easton on life after fame
What was your best business decision?
With Jackie at the Shooting Star Children Hospice’s Charity Ball in 2024
LAURA ROSE/WENN
It all hinges back to that moment when Jackie said: listen, we’ve got no work. You’ve got no clients but you have got a programme that is watched by 15 million people. Nobody did licensing at the time, so we had to sit around the kitchen table and make it up ourselves. But we’ve got an awful amount of longevity with it.
And your worst?
It was probably becoming “That Guy Off Changing Rooms”, because what felt like a ladder in snakes and ladders was actually a snake that later became a ladder. Sometimes what looks like the worst thing in the world is actually what propels you into a completely different space. And I’m the master of post-rationalisation. Anyone who’s watched Changing Rooms will know that. When something didn’t work, I would just make a different name for it.
Do you remember when you first felt wealthy?
Yes, I’d just been given a column in the Sunday Express in about 1995 and, for the first time ever in my creative career, knew there was going to be a lump of money arriving. It was about £40,000 a year. You’d have expected me to rush straight to Jermyn Street and strip the tailors, but actually it just felt good.
How much did you earn last year?
I actually don’t know and I sort of don’t want to know either. I don’t want to know how much I weigh or how much I earn.
Do you invest in shares?
No, what’s the point? I’d rather buy art, jewellery, or good old-fashioned antique furniture. I think all these things are a much better way of playing with your money. If I’ve got excess money, heaven forfend, I want to see where it’s gone: buy something nice with it, do something good with it, make memories with it.
On Netflix’s Celebrity Bear Hunt
RAY BURMISTON/NETFLIX
What if you won the Lottery?
Who’s to say I haven’t? Voltaire won three times. Fronting the Lottery campaign was one of the real highlights of my celebrity career. They came up with the idea of stopping people like me and Noel Edmonds from winning because they would do horrible things and I was going to redecorate Stonehenge. I’d been filming a big series with Fox Asia and had just flown back from Singapore, very hungover. Went straight to Stonehenge with no script because it was all about improvising. I’d just seen The Grand Budapest Hotel on the plane and there’s a scene where Ralph Fiennes just runs away. So that’s what I did. It became the thing of the whole campaign.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learnt about money?
To be more respectful of it. I was dismissive of money for years. It almost became a superstition that if I become too engaged with it, it would dematerialise. You know that fable about the cricket and the ants? The ants are filling their burrow with honey and leaves and the cricket is out there cricketing and fiddling. I’m now a cricket that’s currently identifying as an ant.
Housing is available on World of Warcraft now
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