My Happy Home: Gardener and TV presenter Alan Titchmarsh talks to House Beautiful UK about settling into his new home, not being afraid of colour, and picking up a bargain striped sofa from Dunelm.
Born and raised on the edge of Yorkshire's Ilkley Moor, Alan Titchmarsh left school at 15 to become an apprentice gardener at his local nursery before trading at a horticultural college and then at Kew's Royal Botanic Gardens.
Now 76, Alan has spent more than five decades helping us to grow better gardens and has built a career spanning television, radio and bestselling books.
Best known for hosting the BBC's Pebble Mill in the Eighties, then Ground Force and Gardeners’ World, Alan was awarded a CBE in December 2024 for his services to horticulture and broadcasting. Now, as he settles into a smaller Surrey home with his wife Alison after relocating from Hampshire, he is also sharing gardening know-how on YouTube.
Here, he reflects on a cave-vibe DIY dilemma and reveals how he saved for two decades to buy a dining room table, plus why he's sold most of his treasured art collection.
How would you describe home?
AT: Where the family is. We've just moved into the same village as our two daughters. We weren't intending to move but we found this amazing house, so we're all now in the same village. I'd like to say we’re not chasing them – they're hauling us in.
The house is wonderfully modern and completely different from the Georgian farmhouse where we were before. We're refusing to use the B word. It's a single-story dwelling that’s quite long, but we're refusing to use the B-word because we have five steps! It’s a different way of life and quite exciting. It's liberating.
What makes you happiest at home?
AT: Having time to be here. I love interiors every bit as much as exteriors, and I'm forever arranging things, either in the garden or the house. I've always had a great visual sense. I think gardeners are in the beauty business because we're trying to make our surroundings beautiful, calming or invigorating. Particularly with the way the world is at the moment, the home is such a sanctuary, a touchstone of sanity and reality.
What was your childhood home like?
AT: A tiny terraced house in Ilkley, Yorkshire, on three floors, with a tiny front garden, a back lane, and then the back garden. It was by no means extravagant, but it was always a happy home. You can make a home beautiful, but it's not there to show off. It's the atmosphere you create and the feeling it gives you. That's always been the aim, certainly from my parents and since I've been married.
Right now, what are you up to?
AT: The biggest thrill is that we started my YouTube channel last April, and we just went over 100,000 subscribers, which is apparently quite good in that length of time. The great thing about YouTube is I can say what I want, we can do longer pieces rather than four-minute chunks and people can pause it and go back at will. It seems to be hugely popular.
How would you describe your decorating style?
AT: A mixture of old and new and we've never been afraid of colour. My wife and I used some quite bold colours in the Georgian house and here all the walls are white. It’s a very light house, with lots of floor-to-ceiling windows and French doors.
We’re introducing colour in terms of soft furnishings and sofas. Alongside the modern tartan sofas we bought 25 years ago, we went to Dunelm and got a Beatrice green and white striped sofa. It's lovely to experiment and give yourself a shot in the arm.
Is there a design trend you're least likely to follow?
AT: The other day, I read Kelly Hoppen saying she loves fawn, beige and cream. We're not a beige family. Elephant's Breath? No, thank you.
What's your favourite room in the house?
AT: We've got a very big living kitchen, which has a lantern roof and three sets of French doors opening onto the garden. It's so light and airy. In a way, that sold us the house. Light matters.
I think we all got so low this winter because it's been so grey and dreary. Then you get a few days of sunshine, your shoulders drop and your spirits lift. We are creatures of daylight, not the night.
What's your dinner party style like?
AT: We don't really do dinner parties anymore. We have folk round for kitchen suppers or lunch at our big refectory table. When the children were young, breakfast was grabbed on the hoof, but supper was the time we all came together and talked. Meals around a table are family glue. We're very casual, not intimidatingly posh!
What's on your bedside table?
AT: A lamp, a lavender sleep mist, a pile of books and a little alarm clock – but I almost always wake up before it goes off.
What's your favourite homeware store?
AT: Everything from Dunelm to one of the rare independent stores in Farnham, near us, called Elphicks. I do a lot of internet surfing for furnishings and also get a lot of lighting from Pooky. I love their style and they're not ludicrously priced. The ambience of lighting in a room is critical.
What's your biggest extravagance in the home?
AT: I've got some decent art – or we had. I sold a lot of it when we moved, so here I've got less than I’ve ever had, but I've enjoyed having them in the past.
I've been collecting for 40 years — or 20 years in terms of good stuff, because I wasn't earning enough to buy anything good before that. The art was always my pension hanging on the wall and when we moved, we thought, 'It’s a chance to start again’.
The family were quite surprised when I sent it off to auction. I did call one piece back — a tiny drawing of a horse. It wasn't the most expensive, but I realised I was more attached to it than the others. I’ve got nothing outrageously, ludicrously expensive on my walls now.
And the best bargain?
AT: About 30 years ago, we bought a 2 x 2.5ft white marble-topped oak butcher's table. It cost us a fiver from an auction house. It's been around the family ever since, and one of our daughters has it now.
We also saved up 15 or 20 years for a Robert Thompson table, the Mouseman of Kilburn. He carves a little mouse on every piece of furniture. We've dined around that kitchen table for 30 years. That's our signature piece.
What do you love to collect?
AT: Books, mainly. I started collecting them about 50 years ago when I first came down south and started picking up botanical books. Since moving to our new place, I've thinned out the collection, but I bought a couple of new ones this week – The Gardens of Arne Maynard and The Great American House by Gil Schafer III.
They allow me to disappear. Funnily enough, a lot of the books I buy nowadays are on interior design or architecture.
We don’t need all the bedrooms that came with this house, so I’ve turned two small bedrooms into libraries and painted them with Farrow & Ball Lulworth Blue, which is lovely.
What was your worst-ever decorating disaster?
AT: When we first got married, we had a tiny house — two and a half up and down. No room was bigger than 10 square feet. If you'd swung a cat, it would have been concussed. We painted the dining room two walls cream and two walls really dark brown because in the mid-1970s, that was apparently the thing to do. Looking back, it was like living in a cave.
When you get home, what’s the first thing you do?
AT: Walk around the garden!
What's the housewarming gift you love to give?
AT: Usually something for the garden that they can plant. A Japanese maple is quite good because they don't grow too big, but they give a bit of structure and you can either have them in a pot, a tub or planted.
Whose home would you like to nose around?
AT: Sir Nicholas Coleridge's. He built a folly in the garden of his house, which is a library. I've seen pictures of it inside and out and it's the most beautifully elegant building.
What's outside your window?
AT: There’s a terrace, some 7ft tall galvanised obelisks to stand in four beds and a long narrow border where I shall put seven Pencil Cypress trees.
What's your favourite object brought back from your travels?
AT: I was 21 when I had my first foreign holiday with my parents and from Majorca I brought back a simple handblown green glass vase (below), about three inches in diameter and six inches high. I still use it for flowers. It's such an ageless piece of glass and reminds me of my first foreign holiday. It's been with me ever since.
Would you describe yourself as green-fingered?
AT: I hope I am. I've been living a lie if I'm not! I was eight or nine when I sowed Mesembryanthemum – Livingstone daisy – seeds and they came up. I took cuttings, and they rooted. There's nothing like a little bit of success to embolden you to carry on. Maybe if I'd failed and they'd not come up, I wouldn't have carried on!
Where will we find you every Sunday?
In the garden or with the family. We don’t meet up every weekend, but because our daughters are so close now, we meet several times a week. The weekend is family time and certainly it's time to be home.
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