Kirstie and boyfriend in a location altercation!
SHE is Britain’s bestknown property expert, but Kirstie Allsopp has apparently failed to convince her other half that her advice is indispensable.
The co-presenter of Location, Location, Location has revealed that her long-term boyfriend, Ben Anderson, has bought family homes for them without speaking to her first. And he’s done so not once, but twice.
‘He bought three houses, sight unseen, at auctions — and two of them were without telling me,’ Kirstie admits. With some understatement, she tells me: ‘In one case, I was a little cross at the time.’
Kirstie believes it is, however, a positive sign of commitment to a relationship to make such a huge purchase without consulting one’s other half. ‘If you are a true couple, and love each other, then you trust each other,’ she says.
The Channel 4 star, 52, is the daughter of Charles Allsopp, the 6th Lord Hindlip, a former chairman of Christie’s auctioneers, and his late wife, Fiona. And Kirstie says Anderson’s decision-making runs in her family. ‘My mother did it as well,’ the presenter says. ‘She once bought a house that my father hadn’t seen.’ Kirstie has two sons with Anderson, a property developer. She is also stepmother to his two sons from a previous relationship.
It’s not clear which properties she is referring to in her comments. The family live in London, but bought a house in rural Devon in 2009 that had been empty for 39 years. The restoration and interior decorating of the property became the subject of the TV series Kirstie’s Homemade Home.
Although they have been together for almost two decades, Kirstie and Ben have never married. In 2016, she said they were ‘happy’ as they were and argued that the modern trend for ‘overblown, vastly expensive weddings’ was worrying.