In the end, it was the Beeny boys’ bedrooms that well and truly crossed the fixer-upper Rubicon here in Woods Towers.
My husband, who has been known to patiently endure any number of George Clarke’s bifold-doors-into-the-garden big reveals and gets visibly emotional at DIY denouments where whole villages come together to utterly transform the modest bungalows of disabled war veterans, lost it.
“Dear God!” he cried as the camera panned across acres of faux-medieval fittings and a Little Lord Fauntleroy four-poster. “When a teenage boy is allowed to design his own bedroom, it does not look like that. Where are the discarded electronics, the huge sound systems, the crusty socks? A 15-year-old says he wants a Gentleman’s Club ambience? He means Spearmint Rhino, not the flaming Garrick!
“Who. Are. These. People?” That was, of course, a rhetorical question. He knows full well who the Beenys are. We all do. Sarah Beeny has been on and off our screens since the early Noughties, when she perkily fronted Property Ladder with an engaging mix of scruffy saucepot and brass-tack business nous.
The series Double Your House For Half the Money saw her become the Nigella of house-flipping. She wrote books and, as her profile grew, so too did the scale and scope of her ambition. Where once she felt like (a posher version of) one of us, a gaping Help! My House is Falling Down chasm has opened up. Indeed, suspicions are mounting that, post-Covid, she is on the brink of becoming a Has-Beeny.
Her catchphrase – and, indeed, the title of yet another series – has always been Renovate, Don’t Relocate. But she’s now jettisoned that mantra for Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country, which is on its second series.
Her vision was to design and build a “contemporary take on the classical English stately home” on a 220-acre former dairy farm in Somerset. Grandiose. Gorgeous. Ratings catnip.
The inimitable Jeremy Paxman himself once observed that “the English would wade through a lake of pus to reach a stately home”. Imagine then, the appeal of a stately home with a kitchen island, bifolds and a freshly dug swimming pond.
Actually, we’re five episodes in and I’m not sure we’ve yet reached the kitchen reveal. Beeny moved into the ramshackle old farmhouse in 2019 with her heroically affable husband, Graham Swift, and their four boys Billy, Charlie, Raffy and Laurie, aged 15 to 10. They look fun and wear T-shirts and trainers, despite their bizarre taste in interiors. But let’s just say I’m not entirely certain they genuinely did have free rein in the decor decisions.
