Rooms for improvement
Renovation series House Rules is coming into its fifth season with flamboyant design-stylist Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen joining Wendy Moore and Drew Heath to judge the renovations. Llewelyn-Bowen tells DANIELLE MCGRANE what to expect in the upcoming season.
Have you been impressed with the creativity of the contestants?
There’s some very exciting stuff happening. Amateurs approach interior-decorating solutions in a way that no professional ever would. Professionals are always going to take a route they’ve tried before whereas amateurs, if you teach them right, will do something absolutely original and that can be terribly exciting.
What are you looking for, what do you want to see?
It’s the most extraordinary opportunity for these contestants, with a lifechanging prize at stake, so I am going to be tough.
They’ve got to express themselves, they’ve got to express the home-owner, they’ve got to show personality and flair. They’ve got to work around the house rules as well, so it’s not easy. But when they get it right, they get it so right.
Did you pick anything up from the contestants?
There’s been a couple of interiors I’m totally going to rip off when I go back to the UK. There’s been a couple of things where I thought, “You would not in a million years do that if you were a professional”, but it is astonishingly perfect.
Have you picked any potential winners?
No, and that’s extraordinary. I think that’s one of the big things people will see this season, there is a constant reversal because of the diversity of the judges. A team that did great on one renovation can do disastrously the next week. A team you take for granted as being pretty rubbish suddenly does something so unusual and original that they completely take you by surprise.
I think it’s going to be a very energised series. Anybody who has taken
House Rules for granted in the past is going to be blown away by just how different, how challenging, how dramatic, the whole thing is. And that’s not just my suits.
What differences can we expect from this season?
I think there’s been a massive sense of upping the challenge. Even something as simple as the house rules are much more creative than they’ve been before. The housing stock is much more diverse, everything about this series has been re-engineered to make it much more punchy.
How did you get involved in the Australian series?
They just rang me. I was surprised they wanted a 52-year-old grandfather. I just didn’t see that one coming at all and I’ve loved it. I did the TV show
Changing Rooms 20 years ago and started the whole thing off then. So in terms of renovation shows I’m Abraham, I’m Zeus, I’m the great-grandfather. So provided I canan still be wheeled out of the cupboard and dusted down, it sort of makes sense.
I’m not here to be anyone’s friend … I’m here to make everybody into a better designer. That might mean that I’m breaking eggs but it’s going to be an amazing omelette, darling.
Could you see yourself living in any of the show’s houses?
There’s a house we’re working on in Tasmania and the views over the living room to Mt Wellington and across the bay … it makes your heart bleed coming from the UK where all you ever see are a couple of tarmacked roads, terraced houses and maybe an Ikea on the horizon.