Kirsty Alsopp 'Mildly Dyslexic'.
The housing market may be all doom and gloom, but TV’s favourite property expert Kirstie Allsopp is bucking the trend for pessimism with a new mantra: ‘redecoration, redecoration, redecoration’
Kirstie Allsopp hates having her photograph taken. Not because she is worried about her hair, or her make-up or the way her figure will look in the first pictures she has had taken since giving birth to her second son – Oscar Hercules – last August.
No, Kirstie Allsopp hates having her photograph taken because it requires her to stand still, stop talking and turn off her BlackBerry.
The multitasking abilities of the 37-year-old co-presenter of Channel 4’s Location, Location, Location are so finely honed that she does our interview while simultaneously eating lunch and sending e-mails on the BlackBerry that is permanently clamped in her busy hands.
Along with the punishing schedule of her property programmes and her work with the Conservative Party (she is an adviser on housing issues), she has yet another new role, on the design board of the interactive interior design website mydeco.com, a site that aims to revolutionise the way we design and shop for our homes.
Add to that Oscar Hercules, his two-year-old brother Bay Atlas, stepsons Orion, nine, and Hal, six, partner Ben Andersen, a large London home and a pile in Devon (where the family retreat each weekend), and you begin to see why her life is a ‘logistical’ nightmare that has made standing still – let alone sitting down – an impossibility.
The eldest of four children of Charles Allsopp, the sixth Baron Hindlip and former chairman of Christies, and his interior designer wife Fiona, Kirstie had a privileged but by no means lavish upbringing.
Describing herself as ‘mildly dyslexic’ (a condition she shares with Ben and her stepson Orion), she went to ten different schools before abandoning her education (she didn’t go to university) and embarking instead on a series of jobs that included teaching English in India and working on Country Living magazine, which led her into the property world and the Channel 4 programme she has presented – along with sidekick Phil Spencer – for seven years.
Property remains a passion, and her faith in the importance of owning your own home is undiminished by the current financial crisis that has seen house prices dive. ‘We are 70 per cent owner-occupier in the UK, with a population that has gone up by five million in the past 15 years, and we have never, since the First World War, built as few new houses as we are building now. The market has got to pick up.
Kirstie’s advice to anyone trying to sell a house in these difficult times is to ‘re-fall in love’ with your home by redecoration, redecoration, redecoration (which is one of the reasons for her involvement with mydeco.com), making it both more marketable and more pleasant to live in while you wait (and she warns of a long wait) for it to sell.
By Jane Gordon, Mail Online.
30/12/2008
|
