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Sarah Beeny meets me at the end of her journey – at least where houses are concerned – with her dogs Maple and Piccolo at her feet. 

Viewers of Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country will know this house, which she and her husband, artist Graham Swift, built for themselves and their four sons, Billy, 19, Charlie, 17, Rafferty, 15 and Laurie, 13. 

It is a vast grey classical-style mansion, near the fashionable Somerset town of Bruton, which is mocked – and envied – for its glossiness: the Cotswolds of the West.

Despite living in a glorious mansion, Beeny, 51, has no airs. She is dressed in flared jeans and a bright shirt. Her blonde hair is short. She is open and fizzing, though it is only breakfast time.

I should have known she’d be like this: she is the star of TV shows Property Ladder and How to Live Mortgage Free, and you can’t fake warmth. 

Sarah and Graham with their sons, from left, Billy, Laurie, Charlie and Rafferty

We watched her turn her 32-bedroom Yorkshire mansion Rise Hall into a wedding venue in Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare, and now, in Sarah Beeny’s New Life in the Country, we follow the building of her new home on a former dairy farm.

She greets me with a huge smile, offers coffee, takes me through an immaculate kitchen – the reason for its tidiness will become apparent – and into a library in rich colours, with the most elegant bespoke bookcases I’ve seen outside a National Trust property.

We are here to discuss her new book, The Simple Life: How I Found Home, a combination of personal memoir and an obsession with property. But our interview feels more like a gossip. 

Beeny is easy to talk to and interested in everything. Within 30 seconds, I’m showing her photos of my house, and asking if it should be re-rendered.

We begin with a discussion of the impossibility of putting the coat cupboard in the right place. Swift, 50 – who is considered ‘a bit of all right’ by the village ladies when I ask them what it is like having the Beenys up the road – carefully designed the house, but nothing is ever perfect or ever finished. 

Beeny positioned the coat cupboard, but ‘they [her guests] always go to use a different cupboard because of the natural way people park and then walk in. You think, “No, no, I meant them to use that one!’” Why Somerset? She initially rejected the farm because it didn’t have enough trees. 

Typically, she overcame this problem herself: she’s planted 25,000. ‘Graham always told me, “I don’t want to grow old with pavements outside”,’ she says. 

He grew up in rural Ireland. His mother and grandmother now live in the Southwest and Beeny’s brother Diccon, who she adores – he is married to Graham’s sister – also lives in the West Country. 

‘Graham always dreamt of building a house with parkland around it,’ she says. ‘He’s never stopped me doing anything I want in my life. Who am I to stand in the way of his dreams?’ 

She also hated the academic pressure-cooker of London schooling: her boys are artistic and all are dyslexic, and she thought the London schools repressed their creativity.

Sarah was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022 and has since been given the all-clear

They sold Rise Hall and their London home and moved into the old farmhouse five years ago. It was a long build. One Christmas they ate in the dining room when the house was still a building site: ‘We all had to wear coats,’ she says.

‘You can have lots of houses, but you only have one home,’ she says, ‘because the cat and the dogs live there and that’s where you plant the tomatoes.’ 

There is a huge greenhouse outside, room for many thousands of tomatoes. She didn’t know the area ‘was surrounded by lots of poshness’. Did that surprise you? 

‘Yes! I think Graham sneakily knew about it.’

She thought they would move out of London gradually. Instead, they did it ‘lock stock and barrel. You have to jump. It’s like standing at the top of a waterfall. Once you have jumped, it’s too late, you can’t unjump. You have to make the leap and keep on going.’

I have a particular question about Rise Hall, because who hasn’t dreamed of owning a 32-bedroom mansion? How did you clean it? 

She begins a businesswoman’s answer – Rise Hall eventually became a wedding venue – but then gives up, giggles and whispers, ‘The truth is it wasn’t very clean – it was actually really dirty!’ 

Not as a wedding venue, she adds – they had a team of cleaners by then. ‘But for a lot of the time it was filthy. We had clean sheets and sometimes we would vacuum some of the floor.’ She looks at me. ‘Ish.’

Now the boys are thriving. They have formed a band with their father – The Entitled Sons, so named because they assumed people would think them ‘entitled’ due to their mother’s fame – and played Glastonbury this year.  

Beeny says she was driving them past Worthy Farm, Glastonbury’s home, a few years ago and suggested she buy tickets for them. ‘No, Mum,’ said one of them, ‘I’m not going to Glastonbury until I am playing there.’ 

‘I was like, “Wow, you just state your future”.’ Three years later they entered a competition, won it, and played Glastonbury this summer.

‘They are amazing,’ she says. ‘They are on a bit of a roll.’ Her joy in them is palpable: she calls herself a ‘superfan’.

People ask her if she had four sons (they are aged 13 to 19 now) because she was hoping for a daughter – Pride and Prejudice’s Mrs Bennet in reverse – but, she says, ‘It isn’t true! They are sometimes annoying but definitely wanted. I would have liked six children but I only got four because Graham refused to carry on having more.’ 

She adds: ‘I think I’m lucky having four sons. I always got on more easily with boys.’ Her mother died of cancer when Beeny was ten, which I suspect explains her desire for ‘joyous, busy houses. I grew up with my brother and father, and I slightly struggled with girlie things.’

I ask if the boys are tidy. ‘Tidy?’ she exclaims. ‘No! They are so not, none of them are. I do shout at them a lot about it. They did tidy up last night because of you. I said, “I’ve got a journalist coming so you tidy up the kitchen!” And’ – she preens slightly – ‘they actually did it!’

The family’s home in Bruton, Somerset, which they moved into five years ago

The long marriage – she has been with Swift since she was 18 – is a partnership. ‘I hate the word “love”, it’s so revolting, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘But if you like someone a lot – which is what I say I do to Graham – then you respect each other’s space. We do have a tempestuous relationship. We don’t get on all the time.’

After Beeny moved to Somerset, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She is fully recovered and looks extraordinarily well. Even so, it was, a ‘perfect crash moment in my life. The combination of being middle-aged, having cancer treatment and the menopause all in one go made me quite complicated to live with.’

But, I say, you were under a lot of stress. ‘Me under stress,’ she explains, ‘is not a weepy person. It’s a shouty person. I go from nought to 100 in fury very fast. I used to be able to go through stages: “You’re annoying me, you’re really annoying me, I’m getting very cross”’ – she sounds like Mary Poppins – ‘but now I am disproportionately furious to the crime. Though it is getting a bit better.’

Of course, she adds, you can have a home where you always know where the Sellotape is or you can have a hectic, happy house. And, she adds, she has her own terrible habits. 

Swift once came to surprise her in the flat they still own in London and caught her asleep in bed next to a half-opened tin of sardines. (She couldn’t be bothered to cook, because cooking means mess.) 

‘He tiptoed in, opened the door and went, “Oh my god, you are disgusting.” He said, “It would have been better if I’d caught you with a bloke.”’ Her flashpoints are tidying the kitchen and the family adding to her to-do list.

‘If you can’t give someone something on your to-do list, all you are doing is adding another thing on your to-do list. It’s very frustrating.’ An example is: ‘“Could you feed the pigs?” Some of the boys will feed them; with others I will have to remember to ask them if they have remembered to feed the pigs, then remember to ask them again, and then feed the pigs myself.’

Billy, the eldest, will leave for university next month.

‘I’m going to be honest,’ she says, ‘I don’t want the children to leave home. You wouldn’t build a house like this if you wanted to rattle round in it on your own, would you?’ 

She smiles, but I can tell it really bothers her. ‘I am going to try not to hang on to their ankles. It makes me feel ill, actually, the thought of Billy going to university in London. Graham and I can’t talk about it because it does feel like someone is being ripped away. The boys can’t talk about it. It’s quite traumatic and it shouldn’t be.’

But being Beeny, she recovers: ‘I’m very proud of what Billy does. Fortunately, they seem to want to be in a rock band and so they will be together for ever!’ 

Sarah Beeny's sons and husband at Glastonbury this year

They are already planning their rock-star penthouse, which Beeny the property professional argues against: ‘They have high service charges!’ Anyway, I point out, you told me you are building a recording and film studio in one of the barns, a creative hub for the area – so maybe they will never leave. 

She laughs: ‘Am I that transparent?’ 

We tour the house. It is a combination of Swift’s love of classicism and Beeny’s aesthetic, which she describes as: ‘Hey, let’s just go bright pink in here! I love a bit of everything – love a painted caravan, love detail, like a bit of colour. There is nowhere that is just mine.

I wouldn’t want somewhere that was just mine.’ The dining room is filled with merchandise for The Entitled Sons.

The house looks lived in already: like it has been here for ever. ‘It will never be finished,’ she says, ‘because a home evolves. Bits of it are finished, rooms are finished, we did one spare room.’

She opens a door to a room covered in William Morris’s Strawberry Thief wallpaper. She shows me the secret room, papered with 1940s newspapers, and Swift’s astonishing portraits that look like people whose faces have dissolved. 

He built her a walk-in larder – she has a huge collection of ketchup – and painted a Chinese cabinet for her with birds and butterflies.

The move has meant a decluttering for Beeny, which she’s found difficult: ‘I’d be the worst Buddhist in the world. My possessions really matter to me. I struggle with it. I don’t want to have so much stuff, but it all means something.’

Now they are all in one place, and she is at rest: as restful as she can be. I find her warm and optimistic: before I leave, she tells me something quite touching.

‘I believe that you should choose what you are going to do in life, then just do it,’ she says. ‘You can edit your own story. You can focus on failure or success.’ 

And so, she says, depending on your perspective, you can feel sorry for yourself or you can fly.

• The Simple Life: How I Found Home by Sarah Beeny will be published on 31 August by Orion, £20. To order a copy for £17 until 10 September, go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call NICKY JOHNSTON/CHANNEL 4, @SARAH.BEENY/INSTAGRAM 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25