Mail Online

‘With gin, I’m in it for quantity not quality’

The interior designer and TV presenter, 57, tells Charlotte Vossen about the ceremony of drinking, his longest hangover and being raised on two pints a day – of milk, that is

Gin is my aqua vitae. Everybody assumes that because I’m so dang fancy I’m going to go for a fancy gin, but I’m in it for quantity rather than quality. A good old-fashioned Gordon’s is absolutely that. The ceremony around preparing and drinking gin, however, should be done with tremendous solemnity and huge seriousness – no straws and no dangling monkeys.

I think I was the only child growing up in Kensington who drank two pints of milk a day. My father, Trefor, was a surgeon and was very ahead of the curve. [Llewelyn-bowen’s mother, Patricia, was a teacher.] This was before you had options such as skimmed and semi-skimmed milk. In those days, milk arrived by the milkman, and you only had silver top, which was normal milk, and gold top, which was more or less yogurt. But it worked: I’ve never broken a bone.

The cup is far more important than the coffee. I’ve worked in Australia, where ordering coffee is so ridiculously complicated. They ask you what origin you prefer, it’s like some kind of horrible Marvel Comic Universe of coffee. They never ask the more important question: if you would like

Spode or Wedgwood. I like a strong coffee with some milk in a proper china cup.

I realise I’m on a one-track boomer mission to ruin the planet, but give me a Sanpellegrino any day. I know I should be wandering around with an enormous Perspex tube full of fluid, but I like to have proper mineral water that has been exported at hideous expense to me and the environment from some boutique lake just outside Milan. There’s a crunchiness, there’s something granular, and it’s got minerals.

I once shared a drink with Simon Cowell and Yoko Ono in the smoking room of the first-class lounge in Heathrow Airport.

I was flying to America, and I think we were the last three people smoking on that particular Concorde flight. Simon said he would give me £1,000 if I gave up – and I did, not long after that. I keep forgetting to ask him for it.

I had a three-day hangover a couple of years ago. We went for lunch at The Ivy for my birthday, and then we went to The Ritz. I don’t really remember what happened, but I think I may have started a fight. I remember having meetings the next day and being

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2022-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

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