Top 10: home and garden celebrities

The DIY stars

Just who are the design gurus of our time? And what do you really know about the celebs who turn ordinary suburban homes into des res bijou properties? We\'re not just talking about Phil and Kirsty here; click through our gallery to discover our top 10 DIY stars and to find out how they got where they are today, plus some surprising facts about their backgrounds...

Pictured: Phil Spencer and Kirsty Allsopp

Words: Jack Shamash 

Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen

King of the design gurus - Laurence is a professionally trained interior designer with a degree in fine arts from the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts. He burst onto British TV in 1996 when he appeared in Changing Rooms, doing fabulous makeovers. He is a big exponent of bright colours, swirls and clever paint effects. His camp behaviour, flouncy sleeves, bright shirts and foppish hair, mean many people think he\'s gay. In fact he\'s just shamming: he has a wife and two teenage daughters. He\'s currently working on producing new wallpapers and craft items.

Kirstie Allsopp

Born with a silver spoon in her mouth, her father is the sixth Baron Hindlip and a former chairman of Christies, the auctioneers. She was educated at Bedales, the top public school, and began working for her mother at Hindlip and Prentice Interiors. She married a property developer and her TV programmes have advised people on how to buy property. Her mantra was that ‘rent is dead money\'. In Kirstie\'s Homemade Home she shows people how to find things in skips, run up their own cushion covers and buy cheap goods from salvage yards.  She is currently advisor to the Conservative Party on housing.

Sarah Beeny

Born in Reading, the daughter of an architect, Sarah travelled the world, did various jobs (cleaning windows and making sandwiches) before starting up on her own developing property. Her first TV programme, Property Ladder, was about ‘how to profit from property\'. This usually involved getting a quick sale. Out went the orange wallpaper and purple shagpile carpet. In came the wooden floors, magnolia walls and neat brass fittings on the doors and windows. Her view is that if you can squeeze in another toilet and fit a larger kitchen into the rear extension, you\'re on your way to making a thumping profit.  Sarah has always been very realistic, often advising subjects on the show not to undertake elaborate projects - advice that they generally ignore.

Diarmuid Gavin

The tousle-haired scamp of celebrity gardening, Diarmuid ambles onto the screen wearing old jeans and an open shirt. He started out studying horticulture in Dublin, then began his own garden design business and earned numerous Royal Horticultural Society Awards. He won fame with his striking designs in the show Home Front in the Garden, where he created stunning makeovers. He has always gone in for big structures - large slabs of concrete and banks of shrubs, rather than anything dainty. Diarmuid is currently working with homes designer Terence Conran, with whom he has completed a book on ‘Planting\'.

Linda Barker

Born in Yorkshire, Linda studied fine arts in Surrey, before ending up as an interior designer. She was catapulted into fame, after appearing on the show Changing Rooms, in which she tarted up ropey old properties. Best known for applying delicate paint finishes and doing clever things with strips of fabric, she has appeared on numerous celebrity programmes. She currently has her own home décor catalogue and is involved in promoting everything from furniture to wallpaper.

Kevin McCloud

Kevin started off by trying to get into the music industry and went to Cambridge University, where he studied history of art. He did a variety of designing - both for the stage and for people\'s homes and then set up his own lighting design consultancy. He\'s best known for his work with the show Grand Designs, where people take an old house/lighthouse/factory and try to turn it into a dream home. Kevin appears to love anything that requires huge amounts of work, vast slabs of masonry and the removal of several lorry-loads of rubble.

Oliver Heath

One of the new faces of home makeover TV, Oliver was born in Brighton,  and studied architecture at Oxford Brookes University before doing post-graduate studies at University College London. He went on to design exhibitions sets and started up a design practice. In 1998 won a BBC Homefront young designer of the year competition. Since then has been a TV regular, most recently in the ITV series Dream Homes, in which he helps families to design and build their ideal homes - usually in an ecologically-friendly way.

Alys Fowler

Alys is the new girl on the gardening block. She went to the posh school Bedales,and trained with the Royal Horticultural Society and at Kew Gardens. She went on to win a Smithsonian scholarship to study at the New York Botanical Gardens. Alys has worked for magazines including Horticulture Week and started as a researcher with Gardeners World at the BBC. Her impeccable speaking voice and encyclopaedic knowledge resulted in her becoming one of the top presenters on the show. She has also written several books and spends much of her time encouraging people to take cuttings and propagate them on windowsills.

Alan Titchmarsh

Alan Titchmarsh is undoubtedly the country\'s best known media gardener and the only one to have developed a huge fan-base among non-gardeners. After school, he worked as an apprentice gardener with Ilkley Council in Yorkshire. He took various gardening qualifications and worked at Kew, leaving in 1974 to become a gardening journalist. He is best known for presenting Ground  Force, the garden makeover show. He also hosted Gardeners World and does an annual series of programmes on the Chelsea Flower Show. He has written more than 40 books, including a handful of novels.

Joe Swift

Joe comes from a famous family - his mother is the novelist Margaret Drabble, his father is Clive Smith, who starred in Keeping Up Appearances.  He runs a garden design firm, worked on numerous TV series and now presents the BBC\'s Gardeners World. Joe concentrates on urban gardens and allottments rather than country cottages.