Many millions have suspected it all along, but now the genie is out of the smoked glass bottle, the unvarnished truth laid bare on the pink and orange kitchen units. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen has hideous taste. Hideous. Final proof of this comes in the fact that no one wants to buy his six-bedroom, Grade II-listed, 16th-century Cotswold farmhouse. He says would-be buyers have been put off by the ‘shifting sands of Government policy’. But I believe it was because they’d rather sleep in a sheep ditch than live with his wallpaper. And who could blame them? Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, 50, pictured here in his kitchen with wife Jackie is having trouble selling his six-bedroom, Grade II-listed, 16th-century Cotswold farmhouse. Why? Jan Moir suspects it may be the decor . The £1.6 million property just outside Cirencester has been on the market for more than a year. The retina-punishing interior, with every last primped and tweaked corner of it designed by Laurence himself, must take the blame. Buyers take one look at his work — the neon-hued kitchen, the gravy-coloured drawing room, the tree-painted bedroom, the giant peony print wallpaper, the stone lions by the front door (I could go on) — then head for the Cotswold hills. In a humiliating climbdown, the outrageously camp Llewelyn-Bowen has had to dismantle his own designs and redecorate the place with the kind of bland neutrals he loathes. Ooh, his feelings must be hurt — but surely the only person surprised by the antipathy to his exuberant individual style must be Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen himself? For the evidence of his frightful taste has been there, for all to see, for years. It is not so much his studiedly gaudy everyday appearance, with his tan leather jackets, polka dot shirt’n’tie combos, Guy Fawkes beard and unquenchable fondness for a ruffle — although all that does not help. It is more his murky history as an interior designer and style expert on television shows such as the hit BBC series Changing Rooms. Before it ended in 2004, Laurence had a reputation for making people cry by forcing his vision of grand living on to what he described as their ‘dark, drab and depressing’ homes. Laurence and his flamboyant taste had a reputation for making people cry on BBC hit TV series Changing Rooms. 'The evidence of his frightful taste has been there, for all to see, for years,' says Jan Moir . This usually involved the great man insisting that they threw out their neutral, ‘suburban’ colour schemes and replace them with blood-red walls, furniture made from repurposed fruit crates painted in Liquorice Allsorts colours and perhaps a dado-height glitter frieze of unicorns and dodos. ‘Fabulous!’ he would shriek, as innocent housewives sobbed in the wreckage of their living rooms. Meanwhile, the flamboyant designer would never miss an opportunity to lecture on his phobia about magnolia. He has always been very grand about not being bland. Appearing on the BBC’s Room 101 television show last year, LLB, now 50, launched into a passionate diatribe against the colour beige. ‘In all its gory, in all its understated, delusional blandure,’ he fumed. According to him, beige is ‘always wrong, never sexy’ and is ‘just colour with the volume turned down’. According to Laurence, beige is ‘always wrong, never sexy’ and is ‘just colour with the volume turned down’. But the interior designer has been forced to tone down the decor of his home, in a bid to appeal to buyers . The message was clearer than a coat of Dulux Gentle Fawn. Those of us who love to take refuge in neutrals are deficient in taste and style. We lack the courage and discrimination of design arbitrators like him. He is right and anyone who disagrees is wrong and pitiable. And, of course, it is not really about paint — an undercoat of snobbery pulses through everything people like Mr Llewelyn-Bowen advise and recommend. Yet I love neutrals! What could be nicer than a cool, quiet room in pale cream, a Swedish-style template of white and grey, a ‘greige’ — grey-beige — horizon on a rolling wallscape of Farrow & Ball’s eternally popular paint shade Elephant’s Breath? There are many times when I long for a world without colour, without someone like LLB pummelling the eyeballs with their bullying, hectoring, god-awful taste strictures. And don’t you think that after being creamed and buffed, his mansion looks a thousand times better — a place a person would actually want to live in without throwing themselves out of a bedroom window? Following on from his television work, Laurence now designs a range of furniture and soft furnishings for Littlewoods. His latest addition being a sconce, 'a typically Renaissance way of bringing in romantic light' So where does this leave our Laurence? Exposed as a taste fraud, with fifty shades of egg on face? How did he ever become an arbiter of national taste in the first place? Like many television experts, his credentials appear scant: a fine arts degree and a stint with an interior design company before forming his own company and launching himself on the world. Following on from his television work, he now designs a range of furniture and soft furnishings for Littlewoods. In an advert for them, he enthuses about the texture of one of his rugs, which ‘feels like standing on a sea of soft cherubs’. Squelch and ugh! Anything new? Yes. ‘For the first time ever in my collection, I have incorporated a sconce,’ he says, ‘a typically Renaissance way of bringing romantic light into an environment.’ In one episode of Changing Rooms, Daniel and Natascha from South London complained that Laurence’s scarlet walls (similar to his own bedroom, pictured) , zebra-patterned panels and leopard-print cushions turned their lounge into ‘a w****’s palace’. ‘It’s going to have to go. All of it. Every single bit,’ said Daniel. Or ‘lighting a candle’ as I call it. One wonders how he has the nerve. In 2010, Laurence became a ‘celebrity ambassador’ and designer for Dolphin Bathrooms. He advised its customers to paint their bathrooms black and ‘take a cold bottle of white wine’ with them when they had a bath in the evening. Dolphin went bust the following year. Of course, his greatest creation is himself. With his curls flapping and his certitude of opinion, Laurence was made to paddle in the shallows of light entertainment television. Particularly in the highly sensitive area of interior design, where a great number are unsure of their own instincts and desperate for the benediction of an expert. Laurence, with his definite views on colour (‘purple is sex personified’) and his flowing cravat, was the man for the job. Even if his reputation as a taste monger always seemed far from deserved. On Changing Rooms in 1998, poor Sue Dukes had to be comforted by her husband Russell after Laurence turned their dining room into something that looked like a snack bar in a crematorium. He opted for a ‘Queen Anne style’, featuring a mock fireplace and portraits of Sue and Russell as royal mistress Nell Gwyn and diarist Samuel Pepys. (Oddly enough, it all looked very similar to his own Cotswolds drawing room.) Sue thought that he was having a joke at their expense. ‘I thought she would really like it. I was very upset when she didn’t,’ he said at the time. The £1.6 million property owned by Laurence, just outside Cirencester, has been on the market for over a year . In another show, Daniel and Natascha from South London complained that Laurence’s scarlet walls, zebra-patterned panels and leopard-print cushions turned their lounge into ‘a whore’s palace’. ‘It’s going to have to go. All of it. Every single bit,’ said Daniel. And Jo Thompson from Kent fell out with LLB in 1999 when he turned her playroom into a ‘brown death trap’, complete with a piano painted in orange and brown stripes and a toy box ‘the size of a coffin’. Punches weren’t pulled when the cameras stopped rolling. ‘I kicked him out and called him a pretentious, frilly-sleeved prat with a paintbrush,’ said Jo at the time. It is rather thrilling to know that even with all the time and money at his disposal, Laurence still managed to make his own house look like a stage set for an am-dram remake of Phantom of The Opera. So let us don our dark glasses and take a retrospective tour around the home where Laurence, his wife Jackie and two teenage daughters have lived since 2007. One style writer called it ‘a witty homage to the Age of Enlightenment’, but the house-hunters who have trooped through its portals have been less than impressed. Perhaps it was the orange and pink Manuel Canovas toile wallpaper in the kitchen? Costing £63 a roll, it depicted courting couples at play. It came with a matching fabric, with which LLB had covered the seven lampshades in the kitchen. There was matching orange shelving, ornate mirrored sconces and a kitchen table covered with a red daisy Marimekko print. If he was aiming for the effect of being trapped inside an inflamed tonsil, he succeeded. Before Changing Rooms ended in 2004, Laurence, pictured here with co-star Handy Andy (real name Andy Kane), had built himself a reputation for making people cry upon seeing what he'd done to their front rooms . The bathroom was black, the bedroom had trees painted along the wall, the drawing room looked like a passageway in a country house hotel called Flouncy Towers. It was packed with heavy, shiny drapes, chocolate walls with a nude over the fireplace, burgundy leather chairs, knick-knacks on radiator shelves and elaborate branches of faux coral used as curtain tiebacks. It was exhausting to look at. In the new version, all the clutter and grandiose touches have been swept away. The fancy-shmancy has been ripped out, replaced with acres of cool beige and some John Lewis Berkley hotel lamps. It must have killed him to do it, but it is a vast improvement. After all this time, perhaps the frilly-sleeved, sconce-loving king of clutter should consider a career doing makeunders rather than makeovers. He might even sell his house at the same time.
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen's home has been on the market for over a year . Is his 6-bedroom, Grade II-listed, 16th-century property unsellable? Yes, says Jan Moir, who inspects his recent makeunder of the decor .