Greg James has shared how he transformed his run-down London home into the perfect “granny chic” house.
The BBC Radio 1 presenter, 39, and his author wife Bella Mackie, 42, bought an old Edwardian terrace house in north London in 2018 and live there with their chocolate Labrador, Barney.
James admitted the home was “ruined” when they moved in so they set about renovating it with a “mothy” aesthetic thanks to design touches like “Persian rugs” and “florally bits”.
“So when me and Bella moved into our place in London, we restored it because it's an old Edwardian sort of terraced house,” he explained during the first episode his and Kevin McCloud’s new podcast, Grand Designs: Deconstructed.
“And it had been, I don't want to speak ill of the previous owner, but ruined.”
Property expert McCloud quipped: “In our house we like to say ‘humiliated’.”
“It was slightly humiliated,” James admitted.
“All the lovely old bits had been either plasterboarded or painted over or ripped out and actually what we wanted to do was just to restore it to its former granny chic mothy style, which is what I like to say.”
He credited Mackie, who has written bestsellers like How To Kill Your Family and What A Way To Go, with giving the interiors a sense of vintage flair.
“My wife has a wonderful mothy energy and that means Persian rugs and nice, sort of you know, florally bits,” he said.
“So we've sort of done that, we've taken up some of the horrible mothy carpets and just stripped down the floorboards so it's just back to the old boards and we've out-varnished them.”
The broadcaster - who worried fans with an elaborate joke about quitting radio earlier this year, went on: “Bella's got a really great eye for just color. We've just injected it with some color and some lovely, just lovely bits.
“And I do feel, I feel very lucky that I met her and she steered me in the right direction for it, but I really love it. And it's like walking into a hotel, really.”
McCloud asked: “Do you fall as a couple into a sort of double act of somebody making all the executive decisions and then somebody actually doing the process?”
“Oh, yeah, but I do like planning stuff and what I really love is, I really like experts, I'm really fascinated with people who are just amazingly skilled at building a unit or managing to restore a fireplace,” James replied.
“I just find that so interesting. So, I'll just watch or I'll chat to them and just say, how would you do these... I'm quite good at running repairs and doing a bit of DIY stuff.
“I fixed our flat roof because it was leaking. I can put up stuff, I can assemble things, I can do the paintings and I arrange all that kind of thing, I like that. I'm good at the garden.
“So Bella is very much the interior, I'm in the garden, so I do the garden and much more green things.”
James her long extolled the virtues of gardening on his mental and physical health, since taking up the hobby during the coronavirus lockdown.
The radio host previously revealed the garden was paved and “very, very, sad” before he got his hands on it - although he felt “ashamed” that he had once covered it in AstroTurf.
“We had Barney and Bella’s two dogs, so I got AstroTurf. It’s my greatest shame,” he told The Times. “I will never stop apologising for it.”
James and McCloud’s new visual podcast Grand Designs: Deconstructed debuts on October 1 at 10pm on More4.
It will air directly after the weekly broadcast of the new Grand Designs series, which is due to launch at 9pm the same night on Channel 4.
