Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen on living with his two daughters and their families
The designer on why sharing his home with his two daughters and grandchildren benefits all of them.
Video transcript
LAURENCE LLEWELYN-BOWEN: From the sound of it, we're all going to be sharing the bath water, which is the best way of doing it. We're reducing our carbon footprint by all hunkering in together. I mean, the crazy thing is, this is exactly how families were 200 years ago.
You use the older generation as a social support network for the younger generation to be able to do their thing. It was a weird idea in the 20th century that actually young people left home to work. We now just operate a family business. We live above the shop, if you like.
Jackie's now basically full time-- full time childcare for the three grandchildren, which allows both our daughters and their husbands to really focus on their careers, and it works. So, Billy, I mean, the crazy thing is you look at a country full of grandparents who never see their grandchildren, who are so lonely because of that, and you see their children struggling, because they can't get childcare to work for them. Why don't they come together and actually create the perfect balance? And we're lucky we definitely have space to do that.
But I think it's-- you know, what's happening at the moment a lot is that people are reevaluating how we've done things. And a simple expression of that is the way that we're ordering our interiors. We're now wanting interiors to be a lot more nourishing, a lot more fruitful. But actually, I think we want our lives to be a bit more nourishing, a bit more fruitful.
It's like the French guy that was just on Euronews report saying that we're going back to things that we did before, like being parsimonious with watching our water. These are good things. These are things we should have been doing all the way through the 20th century.
