Category: Featured

Liz Nicholls

All Areas, Featured, Home & Garden, Round and About

Liz Nicholls chats to interior designer, dad & grandad Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, 59, who has helped design Rangeford Villages’ new luxury retirement villages, with his daughter Hermione

Watch the full interview here:

Q. Hello Laurence! How do you like to be addressed?!
“Whoa, gosh that’s such a question. ‘Laurence’ is very cool, I’ve always liked being a Laurence… I was nearly a Lancelot; that was a good swerve to be honest. My father, who hankered thoughts that I’d play rugby for Wales, wanted me to be a Gareth.”

Q. Do people constantly misspell your name?
“Yes, but I’m very relaxed about it. Y’know, ‘Laurence’ is nothing like as complicated as ‘Llewelyn’ so thank the Lord for small mercies! I regret the fact that Dr Johnson brought in spelling. It would all be much better if we just made it all up.”

Q. Can you tell us how you came to lend your peacock flourishes to Rangeford’s new retirement villages in Surrey & the Cotswolds?
“It’s a very organic relationship, happenstance! Rangeford were building in Siddington, on the edge of my village. I work with Hermione and, as an almost 60-year-old myself, I feel the way forward for my generation is to entice people into a relationship with retirement living that’s based much more closely on boutique hotels rather than caravan parks. Just because you’re a specific number, just because you’ve had a specific amount of birthdays, and you have quite so many rings that you can see when you’re cut in half like a tree, that doesn’t mean that the design volume knob should be turned down. Older people are not frightened by design.

This is such an extraordinary odd and Western European attitude! Anywhere else in the world, being senior is seen as a ‘flowering’, as a moment of great accomplishment, a moment when everything you’ve created throughout your life can be celebrated. You celebrate that through colour and commitment, excitement, opulence! Unbeknown to us, that’s absolutely where Rangeford see themselves, too. I found it incredibly refreshing to find a company that understood this. My generation of Boomers who saw the Sex Pistols live don’t want to be shuffled into some ghastly oatmeal trailer park. Actually what we want is somewhere that keeps us active, diverted and alive! So many studies show that the more social contact we have the older we get, the longer we live. So as far as I was concerned it was the creation of a design landscape that drew all its inspiration from contemporary hospitality. I also wanted to reflect a lot of the things I love, especially since this first one was Cotswold-based, and to have a bit of an Arts & Crafts hat on. At the moment people are very interested in this. They see a Brit design legacy that’s not only worth celebrating but ridiculously rare.

We don’t have many things we can put our ‘Britain is Cool’ hat on for, other than William Morris and [Thomas] Chippendale. What William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement did was incredibly influential throughout the world. It all comes from [Morris’s] love of nature. I think that’s one of the main inspirations from the Rangeford projects: they’re all about the exuberance of nature at its most engorged, its healthiest, its most vibrant, when you get as much chlorophyll as you possibly can. I wanted to create an environment that’s… chlorophyllaceous, if that’s a word! The interesting thing behind all of this, and what’s a big moment for me as an elderly ‘designosaur’ (and also for my business) is the point when Hermione is taking over as that arbiter, that figurehead.

This – we found out recently – is what happened with Williams and May Morris. When May Morris took over the business at the beginning of the 20th century suddenly it became a different and very successful proposition. What Hermione’s been enjoying with the installation in Surrey is that people come over and go “oooh gosh!”. There is that slight assumption that a Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen interior is going to be too tricky to live with, too many notes, too much colour, too stimulating! But this is good in the context of Rangeford. To everyone who’s said ‘ooh I actually love this’ she can say ‘yes that’s because it’s Hermione Llewelyn-Bowen, not Laurence! Hermione believes in a more holistic way. She feels that what she’s doing with my pattern legacy is to create spaces that have energy and vibrancy but aren’t necessarily full of… ‘poisonous looking weedy things’ as she calls them.”

Q. I’ve read that you live with your children & grandchildren, which sounds idyllic! Can you tell us about this multigenerational living arrangement?
“In many ways it’s mirroring what I’m doing with Rangeford. They have this brilliant concept which is to encourage their buyers to see what they’re doing not as ‘downsizing’ but ‘rightsizing’. They want their buyers to think about creating a way of living that’s right for the physical resources they have. And, much more importantly, that hardwires the physical resources they’ll have in ten years or 20 years. What’s important for my generation is that you cannot be in denial about growing older. You cannot keep wearing the sportswear you were wearing when you were 20. You can’t keep the Oasis mullet that you sported when you were 20. You have to go with the flow slightly. Noël Coward had the most brilliant expression: he said you have to invite old age in and give it a cocktail. In other words you make it a very gentle transition rather than a point of crisis, a moment when your life is turned upside down.

And that’s very much what we are doing at home in terms of the way Jackie and I live; we’re occupying a fraction of what was a very large space for us on our own, but we’re tailoring it to suit everything that we enjoy. The other side of the house is lived in by Hermione and her husband and their two children and then Cecily and her husband and their two children live in a garage block on the other side of the courtyard. So we are the rock and roll Waltons! We do have that moment of ‘good night john boy’ and all of that stuff. Our grandchildren are an incredibly important part of our daily lives. Our children are intertwined with everything that we do – we work together and Cecily’s husband Dan is our commercial director, and I’m about to do a big publishing project with Cecile. We are literally living above the shop. That feels like it’s such a strange and anachronistic thing in this day and age but I actually think it’s a natural state of grace. This is exactly how families operated in the world, before the 20th century’s obsession with urbanity forced everyone to abandon the nest and leave it to the old crows, only returning occasionally. We are there supporting each other and it means Cecile and Hermione can spread their wings and be who they want to be. They’ve got the incredible safety net and support of Jackie who’s very much there for the children and for them. Meanwhile, of course for us, a stated scientific fact, people live longer and happier when they have as much access to younger people as possible, rather than being confined to somewhere that’s all about you and your generation. My grandchildren are growing up in an incredibly lively, vigorous space when they have cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, all very much a part of the daily tribe.”

Q. I did laugh when I saw your post on Instagram, saying you and Jackie were in Venice, spending the kids’ inheritance! Are you a romantic couple? And will you be celebrating Valentine’s Day this month?
“We are incredibly romantic. And no, Valentines Day isn’t a big deal. I always feel that if you wait a year to do something romantic and thoughtful you’ve got something wrong there. We’re so lucky, we met each other at 19. So many people we know, in their sixties, they’ve only just met ‘the one’, but they haven’t got much of their life to spend together. We’ve done everything together: we’ve grown up together, we’ve built businesses together, we’ve taken risks, not doing programmes, doing other programmes, putting out product ranges, relaunching wallpaper in 1999, in the absolute teeth of the wallpaper depression when no one was buying wallpaper… I’ve always felt empowered, stabilised to do these things because I had my life, my real life, my home life. I was going home to an incredibly safe and secure environment so I felt safe. It encouraged me to be more ‘me’. This is something my daughters have said: they are now making some exciting decisions about who they are, what they a re and what they do. They’ve got this stable, rock-like foundation to be whoever they want to be. A lot of their friends, people their age, they’re querulous and very uncommitted to trying new things, because they’re still looking for that great relationship. Get on with that! Find the right one who allows you to be who you are!”

Q. You won our hearts on television. Do you watch much telly?
“It makes me laugh with my sons-in-law because they have these enormous televisions, as their generation is wont, which we’re always trying to find concealments for when we’re doing interiors. And yet all these enormous televisions play is Peppa Pig and Bluey: they’re not there to watch international sport or nature documentaries at all. They’re being wasted on computer-generated animation. I rather like Bluey. I find it hard not to watch Bluey without having a little tear. I’m often being crawled on by grandchildren and we all find it very emotional – it’s a powerful watch! Of course, at the moment, we’re all over Jilly Cooper’s Rivals which is about where we live.”

Q. Yes! Rutshire, haha! Do you know Jilly?
“Yes! I was sitting next to her a couple of nights ago, trying to convince her that she was almost certainly related to Daisy May Cooper, which would be two polar opposites here in the Cotswolds. Jilly and I have always got on very very well. I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never read any of her books. Rivals is not only set where we live and reeks horribly true on many social levels but it’s also giving me the most phenomenal PTSD from the 1980s. That was very much an era when Jackie and I were at these parties and doing that naughty thing, and it’s brought it all back, rather…”

Q. Speaking of the 1980s, I wonder whether you think there is such a thing as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ taste?
“Basically, there is no such thing as good or bad taste. This is peculiarly British obsession, one that was created – if you want to be very boring about it – by the Earl of Burlington in 1720. That aside, it’s a class obsession because there was a general indoctrination that supposed that the ‘posher’ you were, the better your taste was, which is absolute rubbish! Particularly if you live in the Cotswolds; the poshest people have the most terrible taste most of time. Taste should always be subjective, in fact taste is a word I’ve never used. Taste suggests, etymologically, that it’s decided by committee. Style is a much more interesting word: it comes from the Latin ‘stylus’ which means pen. It implies that style is something you write, you change to suit yourself, and I think finding your own style is a much more important obsession than trying to achieve good taste. Half the time, particularly in Britain there’s an obsession with taste and avoiding bad taste so that you end up with no taste at all, and that’s absolutely what happened in the ’90s!”

Q. What’s the favourite interior you’ve ever visited, Laurence?
“Oh, big question. I mean, I’ve just come back from Venice, as you say, which has a lot to see. I get very excited by interiors that tell stories, unlike the mass-produced ones with delusions of blandeur! When you see the same kind of colour scheme and the same kind of irritating inability to engage, they’re very unstimulating spaces. Inevitably historical rooms tell you a lot. Venice is a very interesting place because style was always unhindered. You never had to worry about being attacked Barbarians or Goths here because you were in an island in the middle of a lagoon. So you were allowed to show off as much as you bloody well wanted! There was no upper limit to showing off. Meanwhile, you were fantastically wealthy, you had access to incredible craftsmen, incredible artists, incredible materials. So a Venetian room is an act of a self-aggrandisement. And I find it very difficult not to fall in love with that kind of expressive aesthetic.”

Q. If you had a magic wand, what would you wish for?
“For everyone to have a magic wand.”

Q. Do you have a favourite piece of music?
“I like a lot of contemporary film music and gaming music, weirdly, including classical and opera. I continue to be very fond of artists like Goldfrapp. I tend not to like too much pop but my playlist is bonkers and eccentric; it’s like a dressing up box of extraordinary stuff from here there and everywhere.”

Q. Final question! You dress beautifully, including today. Are you always dapper or do you sometimes just chuck a pair of joggers on!?
“No. I will put on pyjamas and a dressing gown which I think is very appropriate. But the current obsession with ‘comfort’, I don’t really understand. Wear clothes that suit you, fit you, and you can keep them on. The idea that you’re just going home to watch Gogglebox is appalling… that was the taste police talking, wasn’t it!”

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