Inside Sarah Beeny's tragic loss that changed her whole life

Property guru Sarah Beeny lost her mum when she a young girl, and in this exclusive chat she explains how it changed her perspective on life, especially after becoming a mum herself

Interior and renovation expert Sarah Beeny has been a household name since Channel 4 first aired Property Ladder 23 years ago. Since then she's become a leading expert in all things design, style and house flipping. Her personal life, however, hasn't all been plain sailing, and two years she announced the news that she'd been given a breast cancer diagnosis.

The news was even more devastating for Sarah - if that's even possible - because it was the same disease that took her mum from her when Sarah was just 10. In an exclusive chat with OK!, Sarah explains that losing mum Ann at such a young age left her as something of a mild hoarder, prompted by a need to surround herself with familiar items with sentimental value.

“Home is really important for me,” she says. “But it’s not about how it looks, it’s about how it makes people feel. My mum died when I was quite young and I’ve been sentimental since then. I’ve released myself from some of it now – and I’ve realised that my kids aren’t sentimental at all."

Sarah, now 52, is a mum of four boys - Billy, 20, Charlie, 18, Laurie, 16, and Rafferty, 15 - and she says they recently opened up about their thoughts on their mum's "sentimentality".

“We had a long chat around the fire the other day. They said, ‘Mum, we’re not sentimental because you’re here. You’re sentimental because you hung on to all the things that reminded you of your mum, but you’re our mum and you’re sitting right here.’ And I realised it was so true. Maybe I should let some stuff go.”

The home Sarah has lovingly built and designed with her husband Graham Swift is thankfully large enough to comfortably handle a degree of hoarding, and the rooms are filled with antique bookcases, comfy-looking sofas, and the odd rather quirky item - including Sarah's favourite piece, a bespoke toilet cistern!

"[It's] a brass toilet cistern with Swift & Beeny Sanitary Engineers printed on it – it’s lavish and ridiculous,” she laughs. “We brought it from our old house.”

Her style today, she says, has fully blended with Graham's own tastes, which isn't a surprise given she's been with him since she was a teenager, and married to him for 22 years.

“I’ve been with my husband since I was 19, and living with someone that long, you end up with an ‘us style’. Our styles are similar and we are classicists, traditionalists. That’s partly because of how we live. I’m a bit chaotic and if you have a traditional interior, it weathers being shambolic. I love minimal interiors, but you’ve got to really keep them tidy.”