Celebrity AGA Owners

TV presenter Ben Hillman has spent the past year renovating the Sussex house he shares with his wife, Gaby, and his daughters, Hope Blossom, who is four, and two-year-old Honour Willow. Ben’s TV career began in an unusual way when he entered a competition on ITV’s This Morning back in 2010. Billed as The Next Big Thing, the producers were looking for someone with design flair and a talent for presenting. Ben’s mother was
adamant he should have a go.

It’s a sunny spring morning and we’ve dropped in to see talented chef and food writer Ben Tish at the east London home he shares with his wife, Nykeeta, and their French Bulldog, Piglet, who is full of bounce and character. We find Ben in his new kitchen. So new, in fact, that the builders are finishing touching up the paint on the wall above the sink as we chat.

Paul Hollywood is happy and relaxed when he shows me round his new kitchen.

I must have interviewed Mary Berry at least a dozen times and, in a world that seems full of odd twists and turns, there’s something comforting about the cosy domesticity at which she excels. She looks completely at home in her new kitchen, even though she and her husband, Paul, have not yet moved in but have spent the odd night there. Mary is looking to the future, says she is not at all nostalgic about the past and has no qualms about leaving her home of 29 years.

When I ask Marcus Bean how he describes himself, he replies that he is a “chef and dad” and that about sums up his two passions in life: food and family. He lives with his wife Jenny and their children Ella, Ava and Taia in a gorgeous farmhouse in an idyllic village in Shropshire from where the couple run the Brompton Cookery School and B&B. I visit them on a sunny autumn day and the house is a hive of activity.

Multi award-winning chef and food writer Galton Blackiston combines his time as chef patron and co-owner of a Michelin-starred hotel and restaurant with writing hugely successful cookbooks and regular appearances on high-profile TV cookery programmes.

Looking around BBC Breakfast presenter Dan Walker’s gorgeous new kitchen, I’m not surprised to see a basket full of eggs on one of the counters. Anyone who follows him on Twitter will know he has a bit of a thing about them – poached eggs to be precise.

It’s a dreary, drizzly and cold Saturday morning in February when I arrive on the doorstep of Anna’s Georgian townhouse in Windsor. I’m at the wrong entrance, one she doesn’t use. She pops her head round the door and directs me to the correct one. Running late, dressed in a bathrobe and her face free of make-up, she looks about 12 years old.

If you’ve always thought of an AGA as something for huge country houses, then think again. Now, with the launch of a new 60cm AGA cooker, they are as at home in the city as they are in the shires.

From humble beginnings, Marco Pierre White has risen to become one of this country’s most outstanding chefs, with one critic describing his Harvey’s restaurant as a “meteor hurtling down through the firmament.’ Back down to earth, he talked candidly to Laura James about his extraordinary career, his two AGA cookers and his plans for the future.