There’s a tiny terraced house near the railway line in Chelsea that seems to attract blondes. Until five months ago it was owned by Britt Ekland, the Swedish actress better known for her men — Peter Sellers, Rod Stewart, Warren Beatty — than her films.
Now it’s been bought by a younger blonde. She, too, has been linked with a number of glamorous men: Sean Brosnan, 007’s dishy son, Archie Keswick, heir to the £300m Jardine Matheson hotels fortune and, recently, Lord Freddie Windsor, the 25-year-old son of Princess Michael of Kent.
But Hannah Sandling’s great love is her house. She’s worked towards having a place of her own since she was a little girl.
“I’ve been saving since I was six, when my mum used to pay me £1 to empty the dishwasher. I did that three times a day and was rolling in it,” says the television presenter.
“At eight, I was selling ice cream at Harlyn Bay, near where we lived in Cornwall. I just loved earning money. My parents are like that, too, real doers.”
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Her parents are property developers, but she says they haven’t helped with this house. The property, which Ekland bought in 1979 for £60,000, had been on the market at £795,000 for two years before Sandling bought it last July for £635,000. Ed Mead, a director of Chelsea estate agent Douglas & Gordon, says: “Britt was always asking too much. People aren’t completely stupid, and nobody buying a house gives a toss who lived there before.
“It is in a fantastic little enclave, though buyers are always put off because you don’t get a local parking permit, so you can’t park outside Harvey Nicks, darling.”
The place was also in dire need of a full-on face-lift. Just because Sandling and Ekland share the same hair colour, it doesn’t mean that their tastes in interior decor are similar. Quite the opposite.
“This house was really nasty, in such bad taste it was unbelievable,” says Sandling. “The outside was horrendous, with old rotting flower boxes, and inside was all leopard print and salmon walls, with a red PVC sofa and red carpet. But as soon as I saw it, I knew I was having it, because I can see past those things, being an interior designer. Now it’s so heaven coming home.”
She ended up changing a three-bedroom house into one with just two, both on the top floor. The ground floor remains a living room, with a bathroom at the back, but she has gutted the basement, removing the third bedroom to create an open-plan kitchen/dining area opening onto the second bathroom and a tiny back yard.
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“The cupboards were falling apart, the bathroom upstairs was, like, caveman-style, the whole place was so old and manky, there was no way I could live in it,” she says.
“Downstairs was a rabbit warren and the garden looked like a concrete car park. At one point there was no ceiling, the floor was rubble and there was no plaster on the walls.
“I really thought I had taken on more than I could cope with, and I am used to camping at Glastonbury, so I am fully hardened up.” It got so bad she had to move in with her old actress mate Sienna Miller for a few months.
“My sister found me some builders but I did a lot of the work myself,” she says. “I hung wallpaper and painted walls, I limewashed the floors and grouted the bathrooms.”
It was all good fun for this energetic and ambitious 28-year-old woman who sprinkles chilli on her food in a bid to speed up an already whirring metabolism and spends “30% of my life at the gym”.
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It was also good experience, for Sandling wants her own property makeover programme “more than anything else in the world”. She already does DIY spots on GMTV and is a regular fashion expert on Richard and Judy, but the goal is her own show.
She itemises what she’s learnt from her property experiences so far: “Buy kitchens and bathrooms in sales. My kitchen was half- price from Moben. And tart things up to make them look expensive. My Louise Bradley cushions cost more than the sofas, which were dirt-cheap from Ikea. My kitchen pillows, though, are about 20p from Thailand. I like finding bits of junky things in charity shops and doing them up so they look all new and yummy.
“I used Topps tiles on the kitchen floor, so cheap but so Fired Earth-looking. And I used lots of exotic mirrors and sconces, to give the illusion of space. I bought lovely organic curtains from Habitat, chopped the last third off and replaced it with rustic trim. Some things were expensive, such as the wallpaper from Farrow & Ball and Osborne & Little, but doorknobs came from B&Q. I’m not a label snob, and I’ll buy anything if it looks fab. I’m so against the ‘what’s in fashion’ thing. Go with what suits your house.”
Sandling learnt on the job, after buying her first flat five years ago, a one-bed off the King’s Road. “Then I bought a two-bed flat off Chelsea Embankment, and now I’ve got a two-bed house.”
But is it a smart investment? Mead points out that if Sandling were to sell now, for £795,000, she wouldn’t make a profit. “It would cost £65,000 just to buy and sell, with duty and agents’ fees,” he says. “And she must have spent at least £100,000 on it.”
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The look in the basement is “French, rustic and organic”. The concrete yard has become a “Provençal” extension of the dining room, with a mirrored wall, pergola and crumbly pots. Upstairs is “glamorous and boudoiry”, she says. “The zebra skins all over the lounge are wild and wacky. There’s a whole zebra, with legs, tail, mane, the lot; two massive ginormous zebra cushions; and a square zebra pouf; a look that conveys my character.”
In much the same way, presumably, that the leopard skin revealed the tasteless Ekland. Perhaps, in 30 years, another blonde will come along and replace the whole lot with rhinoceros hide.
Hannah Sandling appears on T4, Channel 4, on Sundays