Unsurprisingly, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen (LLB) doesn’t judge No. 10’s recent occupants by their policies. Rather, it’s their interior design. First there was Theresa May, ‘desperately trying to keep everything lidded and controlled in mid-century John Lewis’. Then there was Boris Johnson in a ‘ridiculous operatic explosion’ of Lulu Lytle. As for Andy Burnham, he’ll probably go ‘mad for Manchester with graffiti everywhere’. If LLB were asked to redecorate No. 10, would he do it? ‘Well I’d have to really get a skittle on if it was for Keir Starmer, wouldn’t I?’ he laughs. But then he leans forward, almost conspiratorially: ‘Though I have to say that if I got a call from the current President of the United States, I’d probably say yes.’
Quite what LLB would envision for Donald Trump’s golden ballroom is probably not what ‘Maga’ acolytes would have in mind. This, after all, is the oft-described ‘dandy’ whose TV career brought sex-swing inspired living rooms, leopard-print bedrooms and walls of hair into home decor parlance. He claims that, since his first episode of Changing Rooms in 1996, only four people have ever disliked one of his makeovers: ‘I think the dream of me was far worse than the reality. People were so worried that I was going to turn their home into a Jacobean sex dungeon that when it was actually a Jacobean sex dungeon lite, they were kind of fine with it.’
I, however, am not meeting LLB to discuss his sex dungeon vision for the White House. Instead we are discussing his art exhibition, ‘Drawn to Adorn’, which is touring the Cotswolds and Stratford-upon-Avon for the next week. We meet over videolink – he in his Gothic office in Cirencester (‘I tell American tourists it was designed by the same architect that did Hogwarts’); me in my brutalist flat in London. I daren’t give him a video tour of my rented, beige living room but he assures me the plant-cluttered ‘alcove’ (read: Ikea shelves) behind me is ‘refined’. He’s shunned his usual TV wardrobe of leather trousers and velvet blazers for a plain blue shirt and thick spectacles. After all, he reminds me, he’s no longer 38. Nor is he 62, as he keeps saying during our interview: he texts a day later when he realises he’s actually 61.
But, back to the exhibition. The drawings are LLB at his campest: technicolour-cum-monochrome pastiches merging neoclassical imagery, Victorian landscapes and modern street slang (the Oxford word of the year ‘rizz’ is daubed in one picture in Roman font). ‘Pastiche! I love that word,’ he says when I share this. ‘I love ersatz as well. I love kitsch. They all mean something very specific, which is that they’re popular. All of those words can go the wrong side of snobbery, like, “Oh, they’re so common.” But common is a good thing. Common means a lot of people like it.’
Does Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen – he who lives in a 17th-century Cotswold mansion with his wife, two daughters, two sons-in-law and four grandchildren – really see himself as the voice of ‘common’ people? Democratic seems to be the word he prefers: ‘What I would love more than anything is to come up with an image that becomes the next lady with a blue face [Vladimir Tretchikoff’s portrait ‘Chinese Girl’] which everybody had in the 1960s. I would love one of my images to be so informal that everybody loved it to that extent.’
As ‘Drawn to Adorn’s’ name suggests, and unlike his previous exhibitions at the Cotswold Contemporary Art Gallery, they are predominantly works on paper. ‘I was doing a lot of stuff on canvas but it’s irritating if you’ve got to do other stuff as well. Whereas this, I can be on a bus…’ LLB pauses. ‘You know, that’s bollocks, I’m never on a bus. You will often bump into me on the train (first class, but I’ve got a senior citizen’s railcard now) and I’ll have one of the pictures with me. I love the portability.’
Aubrey Beardsley’s influence on his work is obvious, with their flat composition and black ink vignettes. ‘I was amazed by how much Aubrey Beardsley came out,’ LLB agrees. ‘When I was at school, I’d do a lot of erotica in Aubrey Beardsley style for boys and they’d pay me 50p. I was literally pornographer royal! But, yeah I loved Aubrey Beardsley.’
Arguably it was Beardsley and the Art Nouveau movement he championed that made the young LLB the LLB he is today. Born in Kensington in 1965, he grew up in Streatham in a ‘half-timbered, suburban palace’. His father, an orthopaedic surgeon, died when he was nine and his mother, an educationalist, suffered from multiple sclerosis. ‘It sounds so Nicholas Nickleby, which it wasn’t,’ he recalls. ‘But a lot of that is down to how forthright my mother was. She was a very patrician human being, holding a young family together in extremely difficult circumstances.’
He describes his childhood home as ‘Cromwellian’ – white-washed and sparsely decorated minus one William Morris sofa – at a time when ‘everybody else had swirling, purple foil wallpaper and shagpile carpets’. ‘I felt kind of imprisoned. It was like I was in an ivory tower, not allowed all of this delectable, indulgent, sexual stuff that everybody else had.’
Art Nouveau became – in his own words – his forbidden fruit. An education at Alleyn’s School in Dulwich was followed by a stint at the Camberwell School of Fine Arts. There, despite being surrounded by ‘corduroy-wearing Old Etonians who were frightfully earnest and soft-left-wing’, he developed the erotic pseudo-classical style that’s come to define his career. His tutors hated his paintings. But gallerists loved them – selling to musicians including Adam Ant and Boy George. If that sounds successful though, he doesn’t view it that way. ‘That’s going to be a very disappointing passage in the film of my life,’ he shrugs.
‘If you got any interior design psychology from Changing Rooms, that was a bit like getting a verruca in the public swimming pool.’
He spent the next three years working at a rubber factory in Middlesex during what he describes as his ‘muggle years’ before he built his interior design business in 1989. But it wasn’t until Changing Rooms that the brand now associated with LLB was born. Even so, LLB doesn’t distinguish between the celebrity that came with Changing Rooms (at its peak the BBC series had 12 million viewers) and life before: ‘I was incredibly famous even before I became famous. In my head, I was always that guy.’ What guy? He gestures at his long hair and thick-rimmed spectacles: ‘That guy!’
More seriously though, he adds: ‘We have a tradition in this country of being very tough on celebrities, and I think that’s a lot to do with the BBC. Most people feel they are a small investor in your fame. If they’re paying a licence fee, they’re ultimately paying your salary. If you can’t cope with that, then don’t become famous.’ For his part, he says he doesn’t mind. But when I ask if he’d go back to the BBC (the Changing Rooms reboot aired on Channel 4 in 2021), he skitters from the question: ‘Yeah, I mean, I keep making noises about not really enjoying television that much. And then suddenly I’ll do something and I really enjoy it, so I get on with it.’
The power of Changing Rooms though, he claims, was its accessibility. ‘Changing Rooms was never a serious interior design show. If you got any interior design psychology from Changing Rooms, that was a bit like getting a verruca in the public swimming pool.’ But it was more political than that, too, capturing a 1990s zeitgeist ‘to do with the phenomenal rise of women in the workspace when the home was no longer a cage’. Surely that’s not the case any more though, with the rise of Generation Rent? LLB doesn’t seem convinced, saying something about the ‘democratisation of lifestyle’. Not quite so democratic, I think, for those who don’t even own the interior they want to transform.
He has no plans at the moment to return to TV screens. But, with more art shows expected in September, he uses the term ‘retirement’ lightly. ‘When you are 62 [61], you need to understand that the rest of your life is 20, 25 years. According to my financial advisers, that’s all the money I’ve got left anyway so I can’t live any longer. I want to just carry on doing my colouring, knocking off a bit early so I can play with the grandchildren and then cracking open the Gordon’s bottle at 5.30 p.m. That to me is what retirement should feel like.’ Unless Donald Trump calls? ‘Unless Donald Trump calls,’ he nods. ‘In which case, I’m minted.’
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen’s art tour ‘Drawn to Adorn’ with Buckingham Fine Art will be showing at various UK locations between 27 June and 11 July. To purchase his work, visit: https://www.cotswoldcontemporary.co.uk/?s=llewelyn&sentence=1&post_type=product
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