Arriving at Linda Barker’s house in Dulwich, south London, is a shock. Curtains falling down, an unkempt sitting room beyond. Could this really be the home of one of Britain’s most prolific interiors gurus? As it turns out, no. I have knocked on the door of one of Linda’s neighbours, who could do with taking some tips from the former Changing Rooms star.
When I do get to the right house, in an unremarkable road of mainly Victorian houses, it is painted pristine white and beautifully cared for. Linda opens the door herself. At 44, she could be in her mid-thirties and in her Sass and Bide jeans has a figure most 20-year-olds would envy. Throwing offers of tea and coffee over her shoulder, she shows me into the kitchen. She is approachable and down-to-earth, which seems to go with the territory of growing up in the north of England. Her family is from Shelf (rather appropriately for an interior designer) in Yorkshire and she moved to London after graduating from West Surrey College of Art and Design.
Linda's meteoric rise to fame happened fairly organically. She says that she fell into becoming a media star. "I had no desires to be on the telly; it wasn't planned." After House Beautiful magazine featured the house that she bought and decorated in 1988, interior decorating commissions and requests to write interiors features flooded in. Her television career kicked off in 1995 when she and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, then a young and unknown interior decorator, were asked to make the pilot programme for Changing Rooms. The show was an immediate hit, pulling in 10 million viewers and lasting nine years.
Barker has since gone on to do a mind-boggling number of other things. She has written numerous books and magazine columns, presented several more decorating shows, created a range of sofas for DFS, survived jungle living for I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, and even made a yoga video. Three years ago she launched her interiors mail order company, Really Linda Barker, which she runs with her husband, Chris. Despite combining this business with her television work and family commitments, she says she never feels overwhelmed and rarely gets stressed.
"On the whole, I'm quite laid back and level-headed." In fact, the only stressful time she can remember was when she was filming away from home when her daughter Jessica, now 13, was small. "I find a way to do the work," she says. "I have busy times and quiet times. I am a true freelancer, always have been, so I know when things are becoming really, really busy and I've tipped the balance, I claw things back." She takes on work, she says "because it's there" and because "being a celebrity is a short window of opportunity. You never know how long you can burn bright for and how long the public will want to see you." She wasn't expecting Changing Rooms to last for so long, nor that her stint in the jungle would result in another "good two and half years of solid work".
Her home, in which she and Chris have lived for seven years, is filled with an air of calm. It is tidy, but, reassuringly, not immaculate. It is a mixture of modern and old, with an emphasis on the modern. The large, light kitchen has stone floors and stainless steel work-tops and breakfast bar. It leads directly into a regular conservatory that the family uses as a dining room. The stone table at its centre is surrounded by pretty, antique covered chairs. It looks out onto a huge, partially decked garden designed by Jinny Blom, which must be stunning in summer, but right now just looks rather wet and drippy, as unfortunately it is pouring with rain.
The sitting room is quite small, with grasscloth covered walls. It is dominated by a very large Buddha head that Linda picked up at a salvage yard in Birmingham. A set of shelves is littered with an assortment of vases and ornaments which are surprisingly unstyled and eclectic. "I am a magpie," she admits. "Because of the mail order catalogue, I am always seeing loads of stuff which is difficult to resist." She also enjoys buying art, and two of her three sisters are artists - one a ceramicist and the other a sculptor - so she has pieces by them dotted around, too.
She buys a lot of her own furniture at trade shows or from an antiques supplier that she uses for decorating clients' houses. Her inspiration comes from travelling, rather than other designers. "I don't have a mentor as such, which is a bit of a shame," she says. "I glean bits from looking at other people's work, but there's no one's work that I absolutely love. Though I do like Nicky Haslam, Jonathan Reed and Michael Reeves."
She also picks up ideas at the interiors shows. "I will do all the shows in the UK, both trade and consumer. I also do some abroad including Maison et Objet in Paris, which has the best furniture designers and fabric houses in Europe all under one roof. I spend a couple of days there seeing what's new and being informed."
The antique look and the distressed look have been informing the Really Linda Barker catalogue, and interior decorating in general, for some time now. Linda thinks this look is here to stay. "People have always liked that look," she explains. "Soft, muted colours have always looked good in people's homes."
However, she thinks it might be time for a change in the catalogue. "We have been running that line for a few years now and we need to offer a new product. I don't know what we'll pick, probably something a little more slick, maybe a solid colour." She admits it's difficult. "The point of the catalogue is to sell affordable style and there's not always that much choice at the price we want to offer to our customers."
Linda explains that it was a friend who came up with the name Really Linda Barker after seeing Linda being mercilessly teased on both Dead Ringers and Alistair McGowan's Big Impression. "Those comedians used to take the mickey out of me for saying "really" all the time. I thought it would be funny to poke fun out of myself." She says she doesn't find it weird watching someone else pretending to be her. "I just thought it was very funny. Even though they were completely taking the mick, it's very flattering to be in their consciences."
Linda Barker will present two seminars on how to decorate on Saturday, March 18th at the MyHome.ie Spring House & Garden Show, taking place in the RDS, Simmonscourt, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, on March 16th-19th. For details see: www.spring-house-gardens.com.