Outrageous Homes (Channel 4)
That’s a first. Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen turns up to inspect a homeowner’s decor, in a harlequin jacket, with his goatee dyed black and white like a badger’s barnet . . . and he looks underdressed.
Swaggering like Peter Wyngarde as Jason King, the campest ladies’ man in telly history, Laurence was launching his foray into Outrageous Homes, on Ch4+, the ad-free subscription option on Channel 4’s video-on-demand service (it’s due to air on Ch4 later this month).
But when he turned up at a £5 million country house dubbed the UK’s answer to the Playboy Mansion, on the outskirts of Stratford-upon-Avon, he was comprehensively out-camped.
With a swimming pool dominating the ground floor, embalmed palm trees reaching up to the vaulted ceiling, and a launching pad for a hot-air balloon on the roof, this home was so outrageous that nothing Loz saw later could compete — not even the terraced house entirely coated in mosaics, nor the cottage with a Wild West ranch in the back garden.
Sadly, the architect and first owner of the Stratford party palace has zonked out permanently, though a statue of him still stands in the grounds.
A first for Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen – he turns up to inspect a homeowner’s decor, in a harlequin jacket, with his goatee dyed black and white like a badger’s barnet . . . and he looks underdressed
Publisher Felix Dennis, poet and professional hedonist, reputedly blew £100 million on having a good time, before his death in 2014.
Felix was first choice to present The Apprentice, but turned it down because, he claimed, he didn’t like firing people. It would have been a very different show with him at the helm.
Recalling his lost decade of debauchery, he once said, ‘My chauffeur of that time used to be bringing up the crack cocaine in buckets. There would be 13 or 14 girls in the house, for three days at a time, and none of them ever put their clothes on.’
I bet you don’t see that at Alan Sugar’s dinner parties.
Dawn and Derek, who bought the Dennis mansion, believe his spirit haunts the place. The bell on a nautical dial sometimes rings on its own.
Ghosts on drugs wouldn’t worry me, but I’d never get used to his mannequins in pirate garb, standing round the four-poster bed.
In a Surrey semi-detached, art teacher Kath was taking make-do-and-mend to the limit. Every scrap of decor was knitted, crocheted or collaged. All her furniture was recycled — ‘Years of skip-diving and magpieing,’ said Kath cheerfully.
In her bedroom, the wardrobe was a recycled fridge-freezer, which she called her ‘electric cupboard’.
The flamboyant interior designer is taking viewers on a whirlwind tour of some of the UK’s most bizarre homes
‘I mean,’ said LLB, ‘we’ve got a fridge in the bedroom, too, but it’s full of gin.’
Unsurprisingly, all the owners are extroverts. Dawn sipped champers as she floated around the pool on an inflatable peacock.
Estelle, whose home is a shrine to the 1970s, lay in a gold bath while Laurence chatted to her.
Then she treated him to a banana candle, a sweet created by Fanny Cradock. Take one of Fyffes’ finest, roll it in crushed nuts, stand on its end with a cherry on top, and drip custard over it. Oo-er, missus!
