Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is the flamboyant face of TV makeovers – but can he sell bras to China?

There may be a famous straight man in Britain who is camper than our Hombre of Homewares, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen – but I somehow doubt it. He can be archly camp to the point of bitchiness.

“It’s really important to evolve your mojo as you go on – otherwise you end up ossified, like Valentino’s hair – which is almost museum-quality exhibit A,” he says, deadpan.

And a propos of women dressing their age he remarks: “I do completely agree with my missus about this whole issue of ‘too young hair’. I think a lady loses power when she turns her back on the soignée, simply to be young.”

We meet, at his suggestion, at his private club in the West End. When I arrive early, he is already sitting at a table with a pot of tea. His hair is as lustrous as ever but less d’Artagnanesque than when he first cut such a dash on Changing Rooms, the 1990s TV show that coaxed British homeowners to move on from magnolia.

“When you hit 50, flamboyance comes from within, I’ve decided,” he says. So there’s no jabot or frilly shirt but a nevertheless quite splendid three-piece suit by William Hunt, who is perfect for his shape “now that I have become quite curvy in my middle years”.

His cufflinks are gold Chinese dragons from Singapore airport. His shirt collar is high, tight and held in place with a tie pin, which he says is very uncomfortable but worth it.

“Chopin always used to say: ‘Dandy has to hurt.’ There’s got to be a degree of pain to prove to yourself that you’re worth the effort – and I like that.” His boots have pointy toes, Cuban heels and peacocks tattooed on the sides: a 50th birthday present from his agent.

We are here to talk about his new documentary, Cracking China, in which a BBC team follows his attempts to expand his business into China (then Mexico), starting with a new line of lingerie – the thinking behind this being that once the female market has been successfully seduced by a lacy balcony bra, they are ready to get hooked on the House of Laurence’s velvet cushions.

While he is funny and warm in person, in the documentary he comes across as quite obnoxious, does he agree? “I know, because I’ve seen the programme. One of the things you have to give up with any project like this is any sense that your ego has to be protected.

“It was a terrible summer and I was not in the most serene place at the time; I was really concerned about Jackie as well as our house move.” His wife of 25 years had broken her leg so was unable to join him in China for filming and the couple had put their big Cotswold pile on the market in order to downsize and build a house for their old age.

There are one or two Alan Partridge moments in the documentary. “I thought I was a bit more like Steven Toast,” he says. “He’s just like me!” 

This bungling Brit abroad schtick is part of the programme’s appeal but his association with the Christmas fairyland fiasco last year had rather less charming repercussions. The Magical Journey became known, inevitably, as Elfgate – a “festive winter wonderland” at a golf club in Warwickshire, which closed down after a day, following a litany of disasters: hour-long queues, a train colliding with a tractor, unfinished construction and so on. It reopened for a few weeks before closing for good before Christmas.

He says that no one has been brave enough to broach the subject with him directly. Really? “No, I’ve never had to talk about it – through no edict from my people or anything.” So what persuaded him to become involved with such a project?

“The problem is that I can just fall in love with an idea and I thought, ‘Fabulous! I’m going to redesign Christmas!’”

Clearly the people behind it must have seemed credible when they approached you? “They were really, really nice people and absolutely committed to the idea of doing something amazing. A lot of people would have kept going and thought, ‘Sod the bad press, sod the dissatisfied customers – actually, we’re going to lose money if we don’t keep going.’

“So I think the flaw – and I was livid about it – was the fact that they pulled the plug on it.” He made a public apology and donated his design fee to a local children’s hospice.

As a consequence of Elfgate, he now actually listens to his wife’s advice – she was dubious about the project from the outset. Were you in purdah? “Not quite,” he grins ruefully, “but every time she walked past me, she just looked terribly cross.”

They met at a dinner party when they were 19: Jackie was reading French at Manchester; Laurence was at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts as a Fine Arts student.

“It was a complete, Olympic instant attraction. She was just absolutely exquisite and naughty and posh and had the most amazing skin,” he recalls. “I was actually quite pleased to find that she had assumed I was gay because it meant that my very, very vigorous stealth pounce was entirely unexpected and unguarded.”

How have you managed to keep your marriage going? “We have completely and utterly grown up together. Jackie has always been very open about her postnatal depression and about the ridiculousness of the circus of our life at times, and the fact that I’ve often not been around.

“But everyone has their own normal and that is our normal. We enjoy each other so much, you know. The children aren’t around any more, and we spend so much time together – we have a Pre-Raphaelite intensity and intimacy. “And, yes, for goodness’ sake, we fall out. I’m quite compliant and sunny – she’s very fiery. When she’s in a bad mood, she radiates static.”

He has always had a bit of a thing about The Good Life’s Margo Leadbetter (played by Penelope Keith): “Yes, I’ve always found her quite erotic – with that helmet of hair and those opinions, and the plucked eyebrows and the kaftans.” Do you consider Jackie in the same way? “Oh, she’s so much sexier – she’s like Margo Leadbetter with Madonna thrown in.”

Both Laurence’s parents came from south Wales – he describes his father’s family as “very intellectual, very genteel in many ways, but very poor”. A grammar-school boy, Trefor Bowen got himself to London to study medicine and became an orthopaedic surgeon.

LLB says his father was “quite grand, romantic and glamorous. He was quite the latest thing in sewing hands and feet back on. When he was at St George’s Hospital – where the Lanes- borough now is [at Hyde Park Corner] – I can remember as a child doing rounds with him. He used to turn up in a large Jaguar, with a fleet of well-behaved children behind him and a wife wearing gloves and a hat.”

Trefor was obsessed with heraldry and making things: “exquisite wooden toys that he made in the garage”. Did he have a Welsh accent? “No, no, no…Oh, I said that very quickly, didn’t I! I didn’t mean to make it sound like that. My mother didn’t have one either.

“My mother [Patricia] was very capricious socially. She’d often be thought of as being a real red under the bed at a posh dinner party but would be Lady Muck in any other context.”

When Laurence was nine, his father died of leukaemia at the age of 42. Patricia developed multiple sclerosis (like Jackie’s mother) “and she was very, very unwell with it. Actually, she battled it furiously and lived very well – till 70, which was a huge survival.

“She was fabulously Mother Russia – protective of the three of us [he has a younger sister and brother] but there was this assumption – particularly for me, who was perceived as being at exactly the wrong age to lose a father and have a mother with MS – that I would end up being something like a socialist or a social worker or almost certainly gay, so I should be taken into some very all-male environment where I could rub my face on the inside of men’s thighs playing rugby, which is obviously the acknowledged British cure for all those kinds of issues. This angered her beyond measure.”

Patricia’s riposte was to send Laurence to a school with a different ethos, Alleyn’s in Dulwich in south London, where he overlapped with Jude Law. He says that he used to dread people asking him about his childhood, “because it just brought the whole bloody dinner party down. You know, ‘What was your childhood like?’ ‘Well, actually, my father died when I was really young and my mother had MS.’ And, of course, people would say, ‘God, how awful.’” 

But was it? “Noohhhhh… that’s the whole point. It didn’t feel anything like that because my mother worked so hard for it to feel, you know, normal. That’s one of the things that I have completely inherited – everybody has to come up with their own idea of what normal is.

“I did go through a couple of years being very navel-gazing, very anxious and insecure – quite dark – when I was 11 or 12,” he says. “I definitely came out of it by the time I was 16. I’ve always felt that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and I do feel that that introversion and self- obsession at that stage really helped me later on.

“I am a very optimistic, positive person now and I worked furiously to find the route-map, the reason why all this shit happens.”

His own children – two daughters, Cecile studying screenwriting and directing and Hermione, who is finishing her A-levels – he says are, “very much goodwill ambassadors for the celebrity child, as far as I’m concerned. They are not brats at all and they are very thoughtful.”

He and Jackie are preparing for ageing in a big way. He describes the house they are building now as the world’s biggest bungalow, although there is a lift with a cocktail cabinet in it for a couple of areas: “I want it to be as much like the lift in the Savoy, as possible.

“But if you don’t have the room for that, don’t have two floors. We are deliberately, quite aggressively, very loudly talking about the fact that we are hardwiring getting old into where we live – because it’s a very important issue – and there is nothing dirty, sordid or wrong with getting old!” He’s even considering his own range of funerals: “I think they’d be lovely. Just because you’re old it doesn’t mean you go beige. Quite the reverse.” 

It’s time for us to wrap things up. Looking back to the 1990s, and how exotic Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen seemed then, we agree that men have changed.

“There was Jonathan Ross and me – we went to the same tailor – and very quickly there was David Beckham and then there was a massive wave of boys who weren’t gay but who looked after themselves. 

“But none of us ever stood up and said, ‘I’m not gay’ – we just got on with what we were doing because it doesn’t matter. Although it did piss off Jackie when people mistook me as gay. And I’m certainly not secretly gay – I don’t like the idea of being secretly anything…”

However, as we leave, he confesses that he does have one secret.

“I think I might be secretly developing minimalistic tendencies.” Shock! Horror! “I’m not embracing it, exactly, but I’m definitely looking around at my ornaments and thinking, ‘Hmm. Too many china dogs.’”

Radio Times