‘I don’t want to be imprisoned in a beige box and expected to wear slacks’

I t is perhaps no surprise that the flamboyant interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen intends to age disgracefully. The 59-year-old doesn’t plan to retire any time soon, but he does want to help others to do it with glitz and glamour. Llewelyn-Bowen has become the design curator for the luxury retirement home company Rangeford Villages.

He found out about the firm after stumbling across its development Siddington Park, Cirencester, near his home. “It was completely accidental,” he says. “They opened in my village and I was walking past and I knocked on their door and asked, does anyone want any kind of decorating done? “I was just struck that there was actually something in place that really celebrated this ability to be able to allow the future.