Owain welcomed us to his house in Penarth to have a cuppa, discuss his new podcast and to show us around his refurbished home
(Image: John Myers)
Best known for his Radio 2 weekday Early Breakfast Show, his presenting duties on BBC One’s Homes Under the Hammer, or his flamboyant appearances in Cardiff New Theatre’s panto, Owain Wyn Evans has decided to take a new venture.
The television and radio broadcaster is launching his own weekly podcast, Love What You’ve Done With The Place, where he will chat with and explore the homes of some of the UK’s most cherished public figures. If you love a nose and spend most of your time on Right Move or Zoopla, this is the podcast for you.
After completing his own house renovation, it’s now time for him to chat interiors with celebrity guests including comedian Tom Allen, former CBBC presenter Angellica Bell and Reverend Kate Bottley.
Owain welcomed us to his house in Penarth to have a cuppa, discuss his new podcast and to show us around his refurbished home. For the latest TV and showbiz gossip sign up to our newsletter
Speaking about the guests who will appearing on the podcast, he said that his unusual format will help audiences get a better insight in to the interiors of their favourite stars.
Owain said:” So I’ve got some great guests on the podcast, Angelica Bell, Nikki Chapman, like a real range of people, the Reverend Kate Botley, Tom Allen. So people who we kind of know and love, and we’ve known and loved for years, but also then interior designers whose job it is to kind of transform spaces. People like Mandy Watkins who presents Wales Home of the Year with me, and it was really interesting chatting to Mandy about you know what she’s done to her home which is a farmhouse that’s been completely transformed.
“Colleen Ramsey who I’ve recently worked with on S4C as well, how her and Aaron her husband, you know travel the world with Aaron being a footballer, and the different spaces they’ve lived in and some amazing stories that you just wouldn’t get really anywhere else.
“The podcast format, I think, is quite unusual because it starts off with me and whoever’s on with me welcoming me into their home, essentially. I ask them to describe what it’s like walking through the front door. What do we see? What’s of interest? What’s around? It’s quite interesting, actually, what people pick up on. So it’s different from a visual tour for sure, even though it is visualised, you know, you can watch the video of me interviewing the person, but it’s very much an audio description through the eyes of the person who’s on the podcast.”
After renovating houses across the UK, Owain and his husband Aaran have settled down in Penarth with their puppy Brillo. They have recently renovated their new home, and added touches of colour and individuality throughout.
He said: “I’ve been lucky enough to be able to renovate a couple of houses and we’ve moved around the UK for work, and in doing so we’ve lived in different houses. Me and Arran have always tried to, where we can, save up and buy a house that more often than not was a bit of a wreck, and then we’ve live in it and transformed it.
“I remember when we lived in Manchester the whole back was off the house at one stage. I was doing the weather from home. Trying to prop a green screen up against the radiator whilst they were builders, you know, kind of taking a circular saw to the back of the house. Arran was doing his PhD. So you have these fond memories.
“There’s a little bit of rose tinted spectacles about that, because at the time it wasn’t fun, but we’ve always lived in the houses that we’ve renovated and we’ve never done it to make money. We’ve done it because we wanted to have a home, and then we’ve always sold those houses in order to kind of move on to the next one.”
Owain continued: “Having lived in London, Manchester, Cardiff, Leeds, all over the place, really doing different bits and bobs, the weather, drumming, whatever. Me and Arran have always said, if we were to go back to Wales, we’d love to live in Penarth.
“Penarth has been our kind of dream location wherever we’ve been. So to have a home here now and to be living here and to be doing the Radio 2 show from Cardiff down the road is amazing, and I love Wales and I’m very proud of my Welshness and I’ve always flown that flag wherever I’ve been.
“I think I’d always want to come back home. There was always a pull for me in particular to come back, that my family are here. Cardiff now is such a great city and I work in London a lot. But getting to London from here is easy peasy. So, at the moment I don’t feel like I need to live in London, maybe the time will come where I have to. But even if that does happen, I hope that I’d still call, Penarth, Wales, Cardiff, wherever, home.”
Owain and his husband wanted to channel their own personal touches to the house, and that includes a motorbike that the presenter used to ride as a youngster. He said: “I think with this house and with every house that we’ve been in, it’s being sympathetic to what is there and making it modern and kind of just, just adding our own touches to it.
“We’re not minimalist, Arran and I, you know, there’s a motorbike in my living room, it doesn’t get more maximalist than that, and we like collecting little things and there’s some people who will come here and think ‘oh my god that’s really cluttered,’ whereas other people will be like oh this is lovely it’s bits of your personality. I don’t like too much stuff, I like it to be sort of curated in a way so I think the inspiration comes from a load of different places and stuff that we’ve seen. It’s just seeing things and being inspired by what we think works and also not being afraid to put a bit of personality and fun in.”
Although the fun doesn’t stop at a motorbike, Owain also has a little bit of Cardiff history in his kitchen. He said: “So, we are in a part of the house that we call the drinkette loungeette, because this was meant to be a dining room originally. The kitchen is over there, but I thought I want to put a sitting room in the kitchen because this is where you spend most of your time, right?
“So this is where the kind of drinkette, loungeette thing came about, and when we renovated this house, this was kind of three rooms. So we did a lot of work to open this space up and we did all the garden ourselves. Then here we have this huge glitter ball above me now, which Arran bought me this for my 40th. Because it’s mounted in the kind of slight apex of the roof here, we thought, ‘why not put it on a winch?’ Because that’s camp.
“So it’s mounted on a winch over there and it does get winched up and down every Friday, almost ceremonially. It’s from a nightclub in Cardiff. Originally, we thought it had come from a club in London, but it turned out that it actually came from the nightclub that’s opposite the New Theatre. When that closed for many years, a lot of the stuff was left in there, and this was one of the things. It ended up in the Splott Antique Flea Market, where I picked it up. Now, it’s here and I love it, to think how many people have danced under that you know kind of dancing their worries away having a great old time. I kind of love that that thing is here now.”
We asked Owain, who his dream podcast guest would be and it is no shock that he’s picked some of Wales’ iconic women. He said: “I’d want to gravitate back to somebody like Shirley Bassey or Catherine Zeta-Jones, you know, a Welsh icon.
“Somebody like Catherine Zeta-Jones, is there still a kind of Welsh connection in her home now where she lives in L.A. and New York? But also thinking big, wouldn’t it be amazing to chat to somebody Like Oprah Winfrey?
“If it was somebody who wasn’t alive, anybody who’s walked the earth, I loved Whitney Houston and Tina Turner, two absolute singing legends. Love to chat to them about their homes.”
Owain who loves music, and credits his career to his drumming said: ” I’m always thinking about if people are writing songs or producing songs, where does that inspiration come from? What are they kind of thinking about? Is home a part of that, I suppose.
“For me the drum kit is not a discreet instrument and it’s kind of such a noisy thing. Actually, I’ve always felt that I never want a drum kit in the house because it’s so noisy and you know it’s not fair.
“But around the house here you know we’ve got nods to it there’s a little drum down there, I’ve got a drum tattoo and so the drums are always very close to my heart. The drums changed my life for so many reasons. When I was younger, they were a coping mechanism. They helped me with anxiety, depression, kind of mental health things.
“Then coming through to now, with me drumming for work, that’s changed everything and given me the opportunity to drum with people like Bonnie Tyler, who is an absolute legend here in Wales, and I never would have imagined that.”
Episodes of Love What You’ve Done With The Place will be released weekly wherever you get your podcasts, from Wednesday, June 3.