One of Britain’s most loved design programmes, Changing Rooms, was responsible for some legendary interior designs. Not all of them were successful – lots of the most memorable designs were disasters. In the main, though, interior designers Linda Barker, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, and Anna Ryder Richardson successfully showed their skills and taste. Designers need to consider everything from the functionality of the room, budget, the room’s size, shape, and flow, colour scheme, lighting, materials and finishes, furniture, and architectural and structural elements like doorways. Internal and external doors can be found in a range of styles and finishes at doorways.co.uk.
As successful as Barker, Llewelyn-Bowen, and Richardson may have often been, it’s probably more fun to look back on a couple of calamities.
Linda Barker’s smashing teapots
Linda Barker and carpenter Andy Kane, known as “Handy Andy”, created one of the show’s most memorable moments in 2000.
The pair made a set of suspended shelves for a prized teapot collection worth more than £6,000. But the shelves collapsed overnight, smashing the treasured teapots. Barker called it “definitely the worst moment” of the show for her – but most viewers would agree it made for good TV.
Homeowner Clodagh in London had asked the producers to be extra careful with the teapots. Clodagh told The Guardian, “I still don’t feel very good about [Barker]”. She described Barker as “still very bouncy” when she’s on TV, but “I just don’t think she earned the bounce.”
The teapot incident wasn’t enough to halt Changing Rooms; the show ran for another four years before it was cancelled after its 17th series.
“Mediterranean love nest”
One homeowner described their bedroom makeover as a “Mediterranean love nest”. Aidan Ruff told The Guardian, “We were basically looking to get a room done on the cheap”. Ruff probably didn’t expect the final result, often featured on lists of the worst ever Changing Room designs.
What was the thinking behind the design, then? Turns out Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen was trying to get sacked from the show. He told Metro, “I remember there was one room that I deliberately did to try and get sacked. So I basically didn’t do anything in it at all apart from an incredibly erotic four poster bed cut out of MDF. And then the contributor I was working with painted some really rather nastily erotic murals which looked more like copulating cutlets all over the wall, and then I just scattered a load of rose petals on the floor.”
Llewelyn-Bowen appeared on BBC’s Would I Lie To You? and told the story as a “truth or lie”. Once the other team had guessed, a picture of the room was shown, prompting raucous laughter from the audience.
Llewelyn-Bowen’s plan backfired, of course. Ruff and his wife Helen were sufficiently happy with the room to leave it unchanged for six years. Not even the Greek nudes carved out of MDF or the array of candles on the floor were enough to make them rethink.
The Changing Rooms reboot
Changing Rooms was revived on Channel 4 in 2021. It didn’t quite hit the heights of the original show. The Guardian TV critic Lucy Mangan gave the reboot 1 star out of 5, writing, “it’s hard to see the appeal of an unchanged Changing Rooms. Not only has design moved on but the bar has been raised. We have Etsy, Pinterest, Instagram and a thousand other displays of “ordinary” people’s creations”. Well, there’s another thing the internet has ruined, then! Changing Rooms. Nothing is safe.
Another Guardian writer, Sam Wolfson, had a similar theory about “Why we fell out of love with home improvement shows”. Lifestyle tips have “migrated to YouTube”; and with the “millions of how-to-videos giving step-by-step demonstrations on DIY and home improvement”, which are “often infinitely more useful than the hour-long home makeover show”, there’s less of a need for a programme like Changing Rooms. We’ll have to go to YouTube to
laugh at collapsing shelves.
