Laurence's wife Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen

Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen's designer husband, Laurence, is famous for transforming people's sitting rooms up and down the country. But there's no doubt her life was equally turned upside down the moment he became famous.

"Behind every successful man there's a woman rolling her eyes." Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen

THERE'S a particular memory that stands out in Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen's mind.

She'd just given birth to her second daughter, Hermione, and the house was in chaos - builders in every corner - when there was a ring on the doorbell. She opened it to find a tabloid journalist and photographer on her doorstep. "The dogs were barking and I didn't want the kids to wake up, so I told them to come in. I was looking shocking - Hermione had been born at home and things were fairly chaotic - and the first thing I said was, 'Please don't take any pictures!'

"But they cornered me in my own house and started saying, 'Oh, so he's left you all alone in this state, has he?' I said, no, Laurence had gone off to film. But they were trying to contrive a really nasty story.

"Then, even though I'd specifically asked him not to, this guy took a photograph of me. There I was, wearing a t-shirt and tracky bottoms, my boobs leaking because I was breastfeeding. And they published that photograph full page and full colour. I was really upset."

If she shudders at that memory, then the rest of the sisterhood shudder along with her. There's no fate worse than a 'Cherie Blair'.

Fame - who'd want it? The friend who's nasty about you behind your back as well as to your face.

But there you have it. Press stories you read about Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen can, as a matter of principle it seems, be edgy, cynical, even insinuatingly snide. Why are these two together when they're so, well, different? (Obviously, it couldn't be because they're happily married.) How does he put up with her being so bossy?

If you believed even a smidgeon of what you read, you'd expect a harridan to answer the door of their Cirencester home. An ogre of a woman who keeps poor Laurence chained in a back room, only allowed out to stencil the odd living room, make a TV appearance or visit the hairdresser. A man who has to iron his own ruffles.

But, no. Really no.

In her sitting room - pin-neat and tastefully coral and chocolate brown - Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen looks surprisingly vulnerable. She's forthright, it's true - says what she thinks without frills - but she's funny, sassy, with not a pretentious bone in her body. Home truths are laid out on the table, with no attempts at cover-up, whether we're talking about her self-confessed OCD over clean bed linen or the family's current infestation of nits.

There you have it: the household of Mr and Mrs Llewelyn-Bowen is a household not unlike many another up and down the country (though possibly a smidgeon bolder in its colour schemes). Ten-year-old Hermione pops in to check on how to cook pasta with sauce. "I missed her school play, her ballet and her sports day this year," Jackie (Everywoman's Working Mother) groans. Over the next few weeks, I'm determined we will have some fun together. Be less of an absent mother." Though when you hear a second later of the cuddles the four of them had watching TV in bed together last night (nits and all), you realise no one's particularly missing out.

Nor is it simply exotic filming that fills her every waking moment. There's the admin for Laurence's thriving interiors business ("I'm always having to think: 'Have we sent off our P11Ds?'"). And the masses and masses of charity work they both astonishingly undertake, above all for local causes in their adopted Cotswold homeland: the Llewelyn-Bowens open this, host that, become patrons of the other... Jackie laughs: "Well, that's the problem with being a well brought up middle-class, socially-responsible girl, isn't it?"

So why all the naff press stuff?

She shrugs. "That kind of thing takes you so by surprise because all you're trying to do is be yourself. But, of course, those things toughen you up so you are more guarded, less open and more savvy."

(Though there are aspects of fame she finds funny, too. "Our window cleaner rang Radio 1 just to tell them he was cleaning our windows. What is that about!")

In most circumstances, you'd feel buckets of sympathy for the 'unfamous' spouse caught in the crossfire. But even Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen acknowledges she walked into the situation with her eyes open. For the first time she saw Laurence, nearly 25 years ago, she knew instantly he was going to be famous. (Well, no prizes there.)

Was he the same?

"Exactly the same. At 19, it wasn't such a polished act, but he looked extraordinary."

They met during a dinner at a mutual friend's house when Jackie was studying languages at Manchester University and Laurence was an art student at Camberwell. (It's easy to forget he's a gifted artist.)

"And, yes, there was a part of me that thought: long hair, hope he's not gay. At Manchester, no self respecting red-blooded man would have had hair that long. The miners' strike was on and we were all collecting on the union steps for the families - working-class heroes desperately trying to throw off our middle-class roots. Nobody would have dreamed of having flamboyant clothing and long hair."

If the white polo-neck jumper and the trousers from the Kings Road didn't swing it for Laurence, then something else must have worked. "He came home with me that night and we've been together ever since."

As the papers love to point out, the two of them seem mismatched looks-wise - she's blond and curvy; he's dark and slim; she eschews ruffles, he embodies them - but for all the puzzled 'how on earth does this relationship work?' stories, the two have more in common than people make out. Their backgrounds, for one. His father was an orthopaedic surgeon, hers a diplomat; both their mothers were teachers.

In fact, her ancestors were pretty extraordinary on both sides: exotic, eccentric and even bizarre characters. Her maternal great great grandfather was Samuel Morse, inventor of the eponymous Morse Code, while her great grandfather designed the Blackwall Tunnel.

"And my grandfather was the very first civil engineer to be made a fellow of the Royal Society. I knew him well and was very close to him. When he'd finished Cambridge, he went off on his world tour, met my grandmother, and promptly brought her back as a prize. She'd grown up in Warsaw and was very beautiful in a dainty, dark Polish way. She came out of finishing school and had to work for a living, so she became a knife thrower's assistant and ice dancer.

"There's one story about her, which may be apocryphal, that I absolutely love. These were the days when everybody travelled with their magnificent jewels, and the criminals used to go round the big hotels cracking safes. My grandmother had amassed an amazing collection of jewellery, probably from grateful men; this one evening, when she was working in America, she got the nod to take her jewels out of the hotel safe, which she did. That night, it was cracked, and it was all put down to Al Capone."

Jackie's father, meanwhile, came from a humble background in Edinburgh. His parents were Salvation Army stalwarts, deeply religious, staunchly opposed to drink (and much more besides). Scholarships got him to university, after which he took a doctorate in Russian at the Sorbonne. Though not one of the 'Old Boy' network (in fact, he trained himself out of his Scottish accent), his brilliance made him an obvious recruit for Foreign Office intelligence work. As a result of his various postings, Jackie spent her first four years growing up in the Congo ("I can remember a monkey that would throw mangoes out of a tree") before the family moved to Germany, where she went to the British Embassy prep school.

"I grew up speaking German, as you do when you watch telly in a foreign country and you know other children who are bilingual. I have always been good at languages because I've lived in different countries so, when it came to university, the most obvious thing was for me to apply to do French. I wanted to take a year off, though, and it just so happened that at my father had been posted to the Embassy in Paris. As a result, I went out to live with him and took a diploma at the Sorbonne in French culture, language, history and literature. I had a fabulous year swanning round the Marais, going to French nightclubs."

After graduating, she was all set to take a sober job working in education. But a girl with that genetic heritage isn't going to sit easily in an office. Her grandmother's genes to the fore, she decided instead (to her parents' consternation) to accept an offer from a party-planning company. This was the '80s when budgets were as high as the party-goers.

"My mother was horrified I was going into something as pointless as parties, but it was a world I understood - that's one thing growing up in the Foreign Office does for you! I'd been to all the cocktail parties; the Christmas ball in the British Embassy in Paris - Josephine Bonaparte's family home.

"All the big advertising agencies had huge expense accounts and we put on glamorous themed parties in places like the Natural History and the Science Museums. I was brilliant at my job, young and energetic, and the late nights were no problem."

She climbed the career ladder quickly, getting poached by other party planners; but it was when she and Laurence got married that she decided to branch out on her own as a wedding organiser. Partly, it has to be said, because she'd so loved organising her own. "We'd cobbled it together on a �5,000 budget. I laid all the tables myself; Laurence designed all the flowers and he iced the cake; a friend did the lighting and the music. We had 160 people to a very Four-Weddings-and-a-Funeral sit-down summer lunch, and then we had another 500 to an all-night party. It was very much that 1980s' fete champetre.

"And as no one else was specialising in weddings, it seemed like a good idea for me to branch out."

Which it was. Jackie went on to organise some pretty high-profile affairs, including Gary Oldman's wedding (or one of them, anyway) as well as writing the 1992 Debrett's Wedding Guide. And with the publication of the book, Jackie found herself promoted to unofficial spokesperson and expert on weddings.

"It was a subject I found really interesting anyway. I'd always had a fascination for the position of women in society and what marriage meant; how dynastic marriages between the Houses of Europe had been used to prevent wars.

"I also love the symbolism of it. No matter what the religion, the feasting food is the same - nuts, seeds, fruits; the promises, the future life. The almond, for example, is an Arabic nut that came across with the Ottomans when they invaded Italy. Marzipan - an Arabic word - and sugared almonds have infiltrated all our weddings and celebrations.

"How people celebrate their weddings is always reflective of society at the time. And, of course, people still spend an absolute fortune on a day which goes in a flash. There are days in my life I've completely forgotten about, but I remember everything about our wedding."

Strangely, it was Jackie who started to appear on television first - The Time, The Place; Richard and Judy - whenever a topic about weddings surfaced. One day, out of the blue, her agent rang. "He knew Laurence was an interior designer, and asked if he'd be interested in screen-testing for the pilot of a new show, and that was Changing Rooms. Nobody had any idea it was suddenly going to become the most watched programme on television."

Recently, she's been doing more filming alongside him. They've just finished a series together for BBC Northern Ireland (hence the weekday absences from the family home). And, of course, she really blew the lid off her anonymity when she allowed cameras into their Cotswold home for To The Manor Bowen, still airing on the LIVING channel.

"But what I hope I've done is simply to suggest that I'm just like everybody else - that I have exactly the same concerns: getting the children to school, packed lunches, PE kit, paying the mortgage. That should mean that encountering me in a daily context won't provoke any major reaction. Which it doesn't. I wander round Tesco and Waitrose all the time."

She can take or leave the fame that was thrust on them more or less overnight: "It's a disease rather than any kind of glory." But the strength of their relationship is never more apparent than when she talks about their 'celebrityhood'. She is, quite simply, enormously proud of her husband.

"One of the best ever moments was when we launched our wallpapers about 10 years ago. The chief executive of a major DIY retailer came up to Laurence and asked him how it felt to be the person who had provoked an entire revolution. It was really nice to hear that from someone in the industry."

Doesn't it drive her mad, though, that he makes all the Dulux decisions?

Not at all. "There's absolutely no point being married to a really good interior designer and then not letting him do it. I'm a really good cook and he would not presume ever to step into my kitchen without very politely knocking first."

And is she ever behind him, rolling her eyes?

"Well there's always that element when you have someone like Laurence. All people see is the veneer of glamour without thinking about the reality.

"At the end of the day," she laughs, "he's still just another man with smelly socks." But, it has to be said, it's an endearingly fond sort of laugh.

"Behind every successful man there's a woman rolling her eyes." Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen

THERE'S a particular memory that stands out in Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen's mind.

She'd just given birth to her second daughter, Hermione, and the house was in chaos - builders in every corner - when there was a ring on the doorbell. She opened it to find a tabloid journalist and photographer on her doorstep. "The dogs were barking and I didn't want the kids to wake up, so I told them to come in. I was looking shocking - Hermione had been born at home and things were fairly chaotic - and the first thing I said was, 'Please don't take any pictures!'

"But they cornered me in my own house and started saying, 'Oh, so he's left you all alone in this state, has he?' I said, no, Laurence had gone off to film. But they were trying to contrive a really nasty story.

"Then, even though I'd specifically asked him not to, this guy took a photograph of me. There I was, wearing a t-shirt and tracky bottoms, my boobs leaking because I was breastfeeding. And they published that photograph full page and full colour. I was really upset."

If she shudders at that memory, then the rest of the sisterhood shudder along with her. There's no fate worse than a 'Cherie Blair'.

Fame - who'd want it? The friend who's nasty about you behind your back as well as to your face.

But there you have it. Press stories you read about Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen can, as a matter of principle it seems, be edgy, cynical, even insinuatingly snide. Why are these two together when they're so, well, different? (Obviously, it couldn't be because they're happily married.) How does he put up with her being so bossy?

If you believed even a smidgeon of what you read, you'd expect a harridan to answer the door of their Cirencester home. An ogre of a woman who keeps poor Laurence chained in a back room, only allowed out to stencil the odd living room, make a TV appearance or visit the hairdresser. A man who has to iron his own ruffles.

But, no. Really no.

In her sitting room - pin-neat and tastefully coral and chocolate brown - Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen looks surprisingly vulnerable. She's forthright, it's true - says what she thinks without frills - but she's funny, sassy, with not a pretentious bone in her body. Home truths are laid out on the table, with no attempts at cover-up, whether we're talking about her self-confessed OCD over clean bed linen or the family's current infestation of nits.

There you have it: the household of Mr and Mrs Llewelyn-Bowen is a household not unlike many another up and down the country (though possibly a smidgeon bolder in its colour schemes). Ten-year-old Hermione pops in to check on how to cook pasta with sauce. "I missed her school play, her ballet and her sports day this year," Jackie (Everywoman's Working Mother) groans. Over the next few weeks, I'm determined we will have some fun together. Be less of an absent mother." Though when you hear a second later of the cuddles the four of them had watching TV in bed together last night (nits and all), you realise no one's particularly missing out.

Nor is it simply exotic filming that fills her every waking moment. There's the admin for Laurence's thriving interiors business ("I'm always having to think: 'Have we sent off our P11Ds?'"). And the masses and masses of charity work they both astonishingly undertake, above all for local causes in their adopted Cotswold homeland: the Llewelyn-Bowens open this, host that, become patrons of the other... Jackie laughs: "Well, that's the problem with being a well brought up middle-class, socially-responsible girl, isn't it?"

So why all the naff press stuff?

She shrugs. "That kind of thing takes you so by surprise because all you're trying to do is be yourself. But, of course, those things toughen you up so you are more guarded, less open and more savvy."

(Though there are aspects of fame she finds funny, too. "Our window cleaner rang Radio 1 just to tell them he was cleaning our windows. What is that about!")

In most circumstances, you'd feel buckets of sympathy for the 'unfamous' spouse caught in the crossfire. But even Jackie Llewelyn-Bowen acknowledges she walked into the situation with her eyes open. For the first time she saw Laurence, nearly 25 years ago, she knew instantly he was going to be famous. (Well, no prizes there.)

Was he the same?

"Exactly the same. At 19, it wasn't such a polished act, but he looked extraordinary."

They met during a dinner at a mutual friend's house when Jackie was studying languages at Manchester University and Laurence was an art student at Camberwell. (It's easy to forget he's a gifted artist.)

"And, yes, there was a part of me that thought: long hair, hope he's not gay. At Manchester, no self respecting red-blooded man would have had hair that long. The miners' strike was on and we were all collecting on the union steps for the families - working-class heroes desperately trying to throw off our middle-class roots. Nobody would have dreamed of having flamboyant clothing and long hair."

If the white polo-neck jumper and the trousers from the Kings Road didn't swing it for Laurence, then something else must have worked. "He came home with me that night and we've been together ever since."

As the papers love to point out, the two of them seem mismatched looks-wise - she's blond and curvy; he's dark and slim; she eschews ruffles, he embodies them - but for all the puzzled 'how on earth does this relationship work?' stories, the two have more in common than people make out. Their backgrounds, for one. His father was an orthopaedic surgeon, hers a diplomat; both their mothers were teachers.

In fact, her ancestors were pretty extraordinary on both sides: exotic, eccentric and even bizarre characters. Her maternal great great grandfather was Samuel Morse, inventor of the eponymous Morse Code, while her great grandfather designed the Blackwall Tunnel.

"And my grandfather was the very first civil engineer to be made a fellow of the Royal Society. I knew him well and was very close to him. When he'd finished Cambridge, he went off on his world tour, met my grandmother, and promptly brought her back as a prize. She'd grown up in Warsaw and was very beautiful in a dainty, dark Polish way. She came out of finishing school and had to work for a living, so she became a knife thrower's assistant and ice dancer.

"There's one story about her, which may be apocryphal, that I absolutely love. These were the days when everybody travelled with their magnificent jewels, and the criminals used to go round the big hotels cracking safes. My grandmother had amassed an amazing collection of jewellery, probably from grateful men; this one evening, when she was working in America, she got the nod to take her jewels out of the hotel safe, which she did. That night, it was cracked, and it was all put down to Al Capone."

Jackie's father, meanwhile, came from a humble background in Edinburgh. His parents were Salvation Army stalwarts, deeply religious, staunchly opposed to drink (and much more besides). Scholarships got him to university, after which he took a doctorate in Russian at the Sorbonne. Though not one of the 'Old Boy' network (in fact, he trained himself out of his Scottish accent), his brilliance made him an obvious recruit for Foreign Office intelligence work. As a result of his various postings, Jackie spent her first four years growing up in the Congo ("I can remember a monkey that would throw mangoes out of a tree") before the family moved to Germany, where she went to the British Embassy prep school.

"I grew up speaking German, as you do when you watch telly in a foreign country and you know other children who are bilingual. I have always been good at languages because I've lived in different countries so, when it came to university, the most obvious thing was for me to apply to do French. I wanted to take a year off, though, and it just so happened that at my father had been posted to the Embassy in Paris. As a result, I went out to live with him and took a diploma at the Sorbonne in French culture, language, history and literature. I had a fabulous year swanning round the Marais, going to French nightclubs."

After graduating, she was all set to take a sober job working in education. But a girl with that genetic heritage isn't going to sit easily in an office. Her grandmother's genes to the fore, she decided instead (to her parents' consternation) to accept an offer from a party-planning company. This was the '80s when budgets were as high as the party-goers.

"My mother was horrified I was going into something as pointless as parties, but it was a world I understood - that's one thing growing up in the Foreign Office does for you! I'd been to all the cocktail parties; the Christmas ball in the British Embassy in Paris - Josephine Bonaparte's family home.

"All the big advertising agencies had huge expense accounts and we put on glamorous themed parties in places like the Natural History and the Science Museums. I was brilliant at my job, young and energetic, and the late nights were no problem."

She climbed the career ladder quickly, getting poached by other party planners; but it was when she and Laurence got married that she decided to branch out on her own as a wedding organiser. Partly, it has to be said, because she'd so loved organising her own. "We'd cobbled it together on a �5,000 budget. I laid all the tables myself; Laurence designed all the flowers and he iced the cake; a friend did the lighting and the music. We had 160 people to a very Four-Weddings-and-a-Funeral sit-down summer lunch, and then we had another 500 to an all-night party. It was very much that 1980s' fete champetre.

"And as no one else was specialising in weddings, it seemed like a good idea for me to branch out."

Which it was. Jackie went on to organise some pretty high-profile affairs, including Gary Oldman's wedding (or one of them, anyway) as well as writing the 1992 Debrett's Wedding Guide. And with the publication of the book, Jackie found herself promoted to unofficial spokesperson and expert on weddings.

"It was a subject I found really interesting anyway. I'd always had a fascination for the position of women in society and what marriage meant; how dynastic marriages between the Houses of Europe had been used to prevent wars.

"I also love the symbolism of it. No matter what the religion, the feasting food is the same - nuts, seeds, fruits; the promises, the future life. The almond, for example, is an Arabic nut that came across with the Ottomans when they invaded Italy. Marzipan - an Arabic word - and sugared almonds have infiltrated all our weddings and celebrations.

"How people celebrate their weddings is always reflective of society at the time. And, of course, people still spend an absolute fortune on a day which goes in a flash. There are days in my life I've completely forgotten about, but I remember everything about our wedding."

Strangely, it was Jackie who started to appear on television first - The Time, The Place; Richard and Judy - whenever a topic about weddings surfaced. One day, out of the blue, her agent rang. "He knew Laurence was an interior designer, and asked if he'd be interested in screen-testing for the pilot of a new show, and that was Changing Rooms. Nobody had any idea it was suddenly going to become the most watched programme on television."

Recently, she's been doing more filming alongside him. They've just finished a series together for BBC Northern Ireland (hence the weekday absences from the family home). And, of course, she really blew the lid off her anonymity when she allowed cameras into their Cotswold home for To The Manor Bowen, still airing on the LIVING channel.

"But what I hope I've done is simply to suggest that I'm just like everybody else - that I have exactly the same concerns: getting the children to school, packed lunches, PE kit, paying the mortgage. That should mean that encountering me in a daily context won't provoke any major reaction. Which it doesn't. I wander round Tesco and Waitrose all the time."

She can take or leave the fame that was thrust on them more or less overnight: "It's a disease rather than any kind of glory." But the strength of their relationship is never more apparent than when she talks about their 'celebrityhood'. She is, quite simply, enormously proud of her husband.

"One of the best ever moments was when we launched our wallpapers about 10 years ago. The chief executive of a major DIY retailer came up to Laurence and asked him how it felt to be the person who had provoked an entire revolution. It was really nice to hear that from someone in the industry."

Doesn't it drive her mad, though, that he makes all the Dulux decisions?

Not at all. "There's absolutely no point being married to a really good interior designer and then not letting him do it. I'm a really good cook and he would not presume ever to step into my kitchen without very politely knocking first."

And is she ever behind him, rolling her eyes?

"Well there's always that element when you have someone like Laurence. All people see is the veneer of glamour without thinking about the reality.

"At the end of the day," she laughs, "he's still just another man with smelly socks." But, it has to be said, it's an endearingly fond sort of laugh.