You don't need to be a green-fingered gardener to create an outdoor space you genuinely love spending time in. Reality TV star, content creator and author Olivia Bowen transformed her garden with little more than paint and a handful of budget-friendly updates – and, in just two weeks, it completely changed the way she felt about the space.
'I'm not the best gardener, I can't lie,' Olivia tells House Beautiful via a video call from her Essex home, known to her Instagram followers as @thebowenhome. When she and her husband Alex – the pair met on season two of Love Island in 2016 and remain one of the show's longest-standing couples – first moved in, the garden was 'complete mud'.
But a heavily planted scheme was never really on the cards. 'We didn't want to go with flowers, we didn't know what hedges to put in, so instead we just went with paint,' Olivia explains. 'We were like, right, let's just paint everything and make it look really fun, colourful and inviting in a different way.'
To bring the idea to life, Olivia teamed up with Valspar for her second collaboration with the paint brand, creating a palette of six shades including a vibrant yellow, orange and blue. 'The inspiration for that was just pure fun, colourful – perfect for the kids, perfect for entertaining,' she says.
Her DIY garden makeover now features brightly coloured plant pots dotted throughout the garden, a metal bistro set refreshed in 'Thundercloud' grey, and a miniature 'beach house' with a sandpit for Olivia and Alex's young children, transformed with 'Seaside Nautilus' pink and 'You Are My Sunshine' yellow.
The highlight, however, is the beautiful Mediterranean-inspired barbecue area, where crisp whites and vivid blues are paired with ornate zellige tiles. At its heart is a large timber table with matching chairs Olivia found on Facebook Marketplace for just £150. Her next move – painting it in Valspar's saturated 'Moroccan Resort' blue – raised a few eyebrows.
'Every person that saw it was like, why are you painting the table blue? You're getting rid of it after. I was like, "No, I can see it",' she says.
But sometimes the boldest choices are the ones that pay off most – and this one certainly did. My dad came over and he was like, "Oh that actually looked really good."'
Paired with a pergola painted in 'White Moss' – a soft white with green undertones – and decorated with festoon lights, the finished space wouldn't look out of place at a bar in Crete or Santorini.
'It does remind you of Greece doesn't it?' Olivia beams. 'It worked really well because the tiles we have from Ca'Pietra, which are on the back of the barbecue, have a blue accent, so it just worked really well. I always love creating somewhere that feels like an escape from wherever I am.'
The holiday influence continues throughout the garden. A scattering of plant pots were painted in the same blue and a punchy orange shade called 'Vitamin C' – a colour inspired by another Mediterranean escape.
'Most of the things I do are always inspired by things I've seen,' Olivia says. 'We went to a beautiful hotel in Lake Como and they had these gorgeous orange-and-white umbrellas and orange-and-white cushions. So I wanted to pick a bit of that and put it in our garden.'
For Olivia, the painted pots are also one of the easiest – and most affordable – ways to make the whole scheme cohesive. 'It just made the garden really come together because you can place them in all different areas,' she says. 'You can even get the kids involved ... it's very easy, harmless and fun for them. So I'd say that was probably the most effective and cost-effective.'
Better still, the whole transformation was surprisingly quick to pull off. 'I think we got everything done in two weeks,' Olivia says. 'But I do have the kids' help, you know. They're little helpers,' she laughs.
The explosion of colour might seem like an unexpected move for the self-confessed 'neutral girl' whose interiors have traditionally leaned towards earthy, pared-back palettes. But Olivia says becoming bolder with colour reflects a wider shift in her approach to decorating.
'I'm getting more and more adventurous as time goes on and I'm not caring what people think as much,' she says. 'I'm just going with what I love, which is, I think, the key to having a home or garden that you really are proud of. You have confidence to just be yourself.'
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The Colour Edit
