Since becoming a household name with the BBC’s Changing Rooms in 1996, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen has been as famous for his quick wit, energy and charisma as his interior designs. But two years ago, the 59-year-old TV personality says, he found himself struggling to cope.
So in January 2022 – amid preparations for youngest daughter Hermione’s wedding – he made an appointment with his doctors. “I said: ‘For the first time ever I’m sort of, slightly, struggling to cope a bit. I don’t know what is wrong.’
“They said: ‘It’s your testosterone.’ My levels were very low. It’s something I was really interested in, because it’s an age thing.
“There’s this obsession that testosterone is all about your libidinousness, your ability to become priapic. But actually, it’s not at all. It’s basically kind of a ‘manopause’ where, as testosterone levels drop, you find life quite tough. It’s difficult to be optimistic. You do lose a lot of your drive. You do lose a lot of your juiciness.
“So I was happy to embrace the idea of testosterone supplements, and I think it’s something 60-year-old guys should be much more up front about. It can feel embarrassing if it looks like you’re going to the doctor because you can’t perform in the conjugal stakes.
“But it’s much more than that. It’s to do with your outlook, the way you feel about the world and about yourself.
“I’d love it to become more of a chat that people have. I’ve got three or four friends I’ve made go to their doctor after talking to them about how they were getting on.
“You’ve got to start the conversation with: ‘Listen, this isn’t about sex, but how are you feeling about who you are and what you’re doing? Are you doing it to the utmost of your abilities as a human?’ If not, a lot of the time it is because at 60, you’re not producing testosterone at the same level.”
As Laurence looks forward to that milestone next year, he says he’s always been “very mindful of how fragile life can be” after losing his father Trefor to leukaemia at 42, when Laurence was just nine.
“Unlike a lot of my peers, I didn’t need that wake-up call, it was hard-wired in,” says Laurence, who lives with wife Jackie, daughters Hermione and Cecile, their husbands and four grandchildren in their eerie Cotswolds manor house.
“I was an epic and really fabulous smoker. I looked amazing smoking. But I gave up very decisively and dramatically at 35 – it probably should have been sooner. With the girls, we were very relaxed about almost anything except smoking.”
Having also cut back on alcohol in his forties, Laurence says he and Jackie are now “much wiser and more wily”, deploying “enormous quantities of water and a couple of aspirin” to mitigate hangovers.
“Hangovers become more appalling the older you get,” he says.
“Something that you could sort out with a fry-up in your youth becomes a three-day event of mourning. You cover the mirrors, muffle the horses’ hooves on the carriages as they go by. I’m like a dying king when I get a hangover now. But alcohol is a neurotoxim.
There are no excuses for injecting a neurotoxin into your world and yes, it is life-shortening. So we really are trying not to do it too much. But obviously, the problem is we’re the ones defining what’s too much.
He’s working hard to stay fit though. “I have a running machine and I’m quite frightened by the sheer momentum an elderly squire at 60, with my girth, can build up. The noise of my running is quite, quite epic. So I always have music on my headphones – it’s a very bizarre selection. Things like the Red Army State Choir, a little bit of Florence + The Machine, some rather odd Tchaikovsky, and Goldfrapp. You don’t want to go there, really.”
Despite being born in 1965, the first year of Generation X, Laurence identifies as a Baby Boomer. “The minute I hit 35 I told people I was 40, it’s always better to nudge it up. There’s such a resonance to being a Boomer, I love it. Gen X sounds too nice, whereas you know a Boomer’s a bastard. I love being the thing you’re not supposed to be, which will surprise nobody.”
Although the day-to-day running of his company Llewelyn-Bowen Design has been handed to Hermione, Laurence recently became design curator for luxury retirement villages, Rangeford after visiting a development being built in his village. “One thing that frightens my generation about retirement housing is being imprisoned in an oatmeal coffin with cheap furniture and an easy-to-clean carpet.
“Rangeford wants to reach the generation that has grown up in boutique hotels and want retirement to feel like Soho Farmhouse.
“Jackie’s now using it like a country club, going to the spa, having her hair done there with Anne Robinson. It’s getting very celeby. Getting older should be about flowering. Most cultures believe being older makes you better, it’s only us who have this weird idea that being old makes you smell of wee and cabbage and you’re useless.
“It’s in my interest to stand up and say, no, b******s. I’ve got as much going for me at 60 as I did at 30 – in fact, I’m probably fitter. I intend to get every drop of juice out of the lemon of life until there’s a knock on the door and a guy standing outside with a scythe. Why would you not?”
■ Find out more about Laurence’s partnership with Rangeford at rangefordvillages.co.uk