Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen on making ageing ‘sexy’
The interior designer tells Lisa Salmon that being realistic about what you can do as you age means you can grow old sensibly and disgracefully.
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Your support makes all the difference.There’s no way Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is going to “shuffle off into the beige” and be “imprisoned in tweed until the end of days” as he gets older.
Far from it – the flamboyant interior designer, 59, is approaching retirement with a distinctive flourish. He’s determined to reincarnate ageing not just for himself but for the older generation, at a time when “you continue to be yourself for as long as you possibly can” by being realistic about what you can do to grow old disgracefully – or even sexily.
“The word ‘sexy’ is never used in association with ageing, but absolutely it should be, because sexy is a state of mind,” he declares. “It’s not necessarily a state of genital stimulation, it’s being 100% who you are – you’re absolutely as full of juice as you’ve ever been.
“One of the things about getting older is about being realistic,” he explains. “Noel Coward had the most brilliant expression about ageing – he said you should invite old age in for a drink. Don’t shut the door and lock it, and go into denial and say it’s never going to happen.
“Work with what you’ve got and make it a sociable, fun, elegant experience – it’s growing old more sensibly so you can be disgraceful.”
Llewelyn-Bowen, who rose to fame as the charismatic interior designer on the BBC’s home makeover show, Changing Rooms, is only 59 himself, but says he thinks of himself as 60. “I’ve been saying I’m 60 since I was 40 really, more than anything so people say ‘Wow, you look great’,” he admits with a chuckle.
“It doesn’t make any difference whether I’m 60, 65, or 55, I’m still headed in the same direction, and actually how far I’ve come, and how long I’ve got left, is a lot to do with the way I feel about life and the way I feel about how much fun I’m having, how much I’m enjoying life.
“This is one of the things I want to get my generation to really start embracing – you’ve got to start enjoying what you’ve got.”
As part of his quest to get older people to make the most of what they’ve got, Llewelyn-Bowen has become the design curator for the luxury retirement home company Rangeford Villages.
“I want to design spaces that don’t look like sheltered housing,” he explains. “I don’t want them to look like old people’s homes. I don’t want them to smell of wee and cabbage.
“No matter how fit we feel we are – and a lot of us are probably fitter in our 60s than we were in our 20s – that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re indestructible, and indefatigable.
“Quietly, gently, using design to recalibrate your environment and lifestyle is absolutely the smartest thing to do at this stage, before it starts becoming critical. Understand that it can be you, it can be wonderful, designy, swirly, purple or orange – it doesn’t have to be orthopaedic pink.”
So Llewelyn-Bowen has included plenty of sensible-yet-stylish additions into what he describes as his “boutique hotel” retirement housing designs, including plenty of storage for down-sizers, rooms that look out onto green space, and staircases with a very gentle rise.
Describing his staircase designs, he explains: “It’s not just an orthopaedic solution, it’s actually something the Georgians would have done without thinking, because they wanted staircases to be elegant and gracious. It’s using design solutions that have an incredible elegance, but that elegance also makes them much easier to use as your physical resources become more challenged.
“If you design a way to live that can accommodate things being a bit more difficult, or you being a bit slower, or things you actually need a bit more, as part of your vision when you’re 60, when you’re 90 it’s in place and it feels natural.”
Although Llewelyn-Bowen clearly hasn’t retired himself yet, he’s been planning for it with his wife Jackie for years, and has already downsized in his 17th-century manor house so one of their daughters lives in part of it with her family, and their other daughter and her family live in a house created from a garage block on the other side of the house’s courtyard. “So we’re our own kind of weird cult,” he jokes.
“We’re contracting within the house – Jackie and I are now moving into a much smaller space than than we had before, and I love the way that now everything is so unbelievably convenient.”
He admits that physically he’s creaking slightly, and says: “My knees are really cross with me, and I think that’s probably a lifetime of wearing Cuban heels. But I’m gonna do all I can to stave that off – even if I end up wearing carpet slippers, they’re gonna have Cuban heels.
“Of course, there’s plenty of things that I suddenly find less easy to do, but that’s fine, I accept that. What I think is the real problem is when you fight these things.
“People of my generation should be realistic about the time they’ve got left, and making sure they’re doing everything to make that clock work as well as possible, psychologically as well as physically.
“Psychologically, one of the big ways of doing that is to reincarnate a bit, and downsizing is a massive part of that.”
Although he’s not quite there himself yet, Llewelyn-Bowen describes retirement as “like a moment of liberation”, and says he’s “fighting furiously” to reduce his generation’s panic about the idea of growing old. He observes: “I think previous generations just threw their hands up and went, ‘Okay, I’m going to shuffle off into the beige – imprison me in tweed now until the end of days’.
“But we took it a bit too seriously back in the day that we were going to live fast and die young. And of course, we’ve ended up not dying young, which has meant we’ve got to completely recalibrate who we are.
“We can continue with all of that energy, all of that juiciness, all of that craziness, all that rock ‘n roll for as long as possible, provided there isn’t too much of the irritating, boring, logistical stuff that gets in the way and saps the energy.”
And it’s not just appropriate housing that the designer, renowned for his sartorial elegance, is urging his generation to rethink – he can’t resist having a dig at men his age who swan around in sportswear.
“I’m always highly amused by, but rather judgmental about, my generation, particularly the men, and the fact they seem to be absolutely incapable of understanding that they’re now old, so they’re wandering around in football kits and sportswear and t-shirts.
“For goodness sake guys, we’ve all got necks like turkeys and boobs – now is not the time to be dressing like that! We’re never going to be Apollo in a beautiful loincloth any more, but we can be Zeus in a suit, which is actually so much more powerful, so much more sexy.
“Like Noel Coward said, it’s all about stealing a march on old age by seducing it a bit, inviting it in, giving it a drink, telling it a few jokes, rather than having a stand-up confrontation, shouting match with old age.
“Because old age will always win.”
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is the new design curator for Rangeford Villages luxury retirement villages.