Sarah Beeny’s home in Somerset – which viewers of Channel 4’s Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country will be familiar with – has been a total labour of love for the property expert. Alongside husband Graham Swift, the former Property Ladder presenter has lovingly created an incredible space, complete with boat lake and recording studio, for them and their four sons.
It’s taken years of designing, planning and decorating, and hasn’t been without its dramas, but the end result is everything Sarah and Graham wanted – a classicalist, traditional, yet cosy and comfortable house that feels well and truly like a home, she told OK! in an exclusive new chat. The house itself is set in 220 acres of gorgeous countryside, and was built in a Victorian-Georgian mixed style, which reflects what would have stood there had there been a building to renovate.
While it’s inviting and cosy, one thing it certainly isn’t is minimal, which Sarah can easily explain. “I’ve been with my husband since I was 19, and living with someone that long, you end up with an ‘us style’,” she said. “Our styles are similar and we are classicists, traditionalists. That’s partly because of how we live. I’m a bit chaotic and if you have a traditional interior, it weathers being shambolic. I love minimal interiors, but you’ve got to really keep them tidy.”
Within the 200-plus acres also sits a boatlake, complete with a new boathouse – which Sarah said she decided to build after becoming fascinated with the craft of thatching a roof, and it was “the smallest thing we could think of to thatch”.
There’s also a new uber-stylish studio, complete with recording space, potential film set space, some wonderfully-designed bathrooms (complete with one of Sarah’s favourite type of flooring – vinyl).
“Historically, they’ve had bad press but when you find a cool print, it can look fantastic,” she says of the heavily-patterned vinyl floors, which are useful for hiding a multitude of sins, especially in a bathroom and with four boys around the house.
Her most favourite item in amongst all the antique bookcases, oak desks, shaker-style kitchen cupboards actually occupies another of the home’s bathrooms – a brass bespoke toilet cistern.
“[It has] Swift & Beeny Sanitary Engineers printed on it – it’s lavish and ridiculous,” she laughed. “We brought it from our old house.”
It was especially important to Sarah, who shared the news in 2022 that she had breast cancer, to make the house a home because of her four sons – Billy, 20, Charlie, 18, Laurie, 16, and Rafferty, 15.
After losing her own mum, Ann, to breast cancer when she was 39 and Sarah just 10, the mum of four admits she’s become very sentimental about the items she surrounds herself with.
Thankfully though, it’s not the same for her own boys because they still have their mum very much alive and determined to make the most of their life together.
“Home is really important for me,” she said. “But it’s not about how it looks, it’s about how it makes people feel. My mum died when I was quite young and I’ve been sentimental since then. I’ve released myself from some of it now – and I’ve realised that my kids aren’t sentimental at all.
“We had a long chat around the fire the other day. They said, ‘Mum, we’re not sentimental because you’re here. You’re sentimental because you hung on to all the things that reminded you of your mum, but you’re our mum and you’re sitting right here.’ And I realised it was so true. Maybe I should let some stuff go.”
Their interiors style is traditional, Sarah says, which is in part because it lends itself to actually looking better with a bit of chaos.
“I’ve been with my husband since I was 19, and living with someone that long, you end up with an ‘us style’. Our styles are similar and we are classicists, traditionalists. That’s partly because of how we live. I’m a bit chaotic and if you have a traditional interior, it weathers being shambolic. I love minimal interiors, but you’ve got to really keep them tidy.”