Anna Ryder Richardson's Latest Makeover

By Beth Pearson

ANNA Ryder-Richardson knows better than most that if there’s one thing sure to disrupt a carefully put together interior design scheme, it’s children. The former presenter of Changing Rooms and House Invaders lives with her husband, restaurateur Colin MacDougall, and daughters Bibi Belle and Dixie Dot in a Georgian mansion in Glasgow’s Park Circus, but even she can’t keep the walls clean.  
“Bibi decided to make a collage on the kitchen wall the other day,” says Anna, 43. “Initially I thought ‘no!’ but then I thought ‘well, she’s obviously got some idea in her head’. She had yellow felt, a stethoscope . . . I thought I’d leave her to it then work out what she means by it.
“We’ve also got a beautiful sculpture, which is a two-metre diameter fibreglass ball. It’s gorgeous, but it’s also a play thing for them and is frequently covered in chocolate.”
Anna, of course, has a keen eye for shapes, colours and designs. She is currently occupied with her forthcoming Rock’n’Roll Baby range of carriers, pushchairs and bags and finds inspiration in the most unlikely places.  This recently involved secretly photographing the feet of a stranger who was wearing colourful flip-flops (“Colin was horrified”).  Consequently, she’s always looking for that flash of inspiration in the “work” of Bibi, five, and Dixie, four.
“I’ve been watching, ready to turn around and say ‘there’s a Picasso!’” she laughs. Yet Anna’s alertness to inherited characteristics has a deeper motive than that of most parents.
“I’m adopted and when Bibi was born Colin said: ‘That’s your first blood relative’,” she says. “It was a real ‘gosh, yes it is!’ moment and since then I’ve been looking for the moment that I look at them and think ‘gosh, they really look like me!’ But they don’t look like me at all.
“I’m half Malaysian, half English and Colin’s Glaswegian. [The children have] amazing, curly, mad auburn hair. The hair isn’t from Colin’s side, so it must have come from my blood mother. Bibi has slightly sallow skin, so I presume that came from me, too.”
The girls attend the Steiner school in Yorkhill, where their creativity is encouraged. Anna and Colin had discussed sending them to the nearby Gaelic school, however Anna wasn’t sure about the girls effectively having their “own language” since neither she nor Colin speak Gaelic.
“I’d heard about Steiner and had been interested long before I’d had children,” says Anna. “We went along to visit and met the kindly [nursery] teacher Janet and . . . I know Bibi loves me more than anything but I sometimes question how much she loves Janet!
“The whole school is full of extraordinary teachers. They’re taught to care about other people, express themselves, bake bread and tend the garden.  A friend who’s a teacher says they come out and they’re really ‘wet’ but I think they’re just not afraid of expressing their emotions. If I could have gone to a school like that I’d have loved it.”
Anna’s interest in art and design wasn’t nurtured at school and she says she fell into interior design by accident. She’d been teaching keep fit for several years when she met an interior designer whose office, full of swatches and drawings, caught her imagination. She became her assistant before taking on her own private commissions. Soon, she’d begun to specialise in children’s décor, specifically animal-shaped sleeping bags which had an elephant, monkey or pig pillow section and corresponding body design on the bag. A television career came knocking after she contributed to a children’s craft activities book and its publisher was asked to suggest interior designers to screen test for BBC’s Good Morning. The rest is MDF-filled history.
“I had such a great time,” she says. “I really did, but I don’t do much interior design now. I hope that Rock’n’Roll Baby will launch in spring next year. It’s based on the idea that just because a woman has a baby, it doesn’t mean she loses all sense of style or fashion. I know the navy baby-carrier is the biggest-selling and will never go away, but mine are funkier than that. They’re made of denim or mock croc, but they’re not tacky. The fold-up umbrella strollers are lightweight and will tip back a bit for when the baby goes to sleep.”
Suffice to say, Anna has a full life. The family regularly take off to the countryside, most recently to Loch Lomond for “a day of bliss” with barbecued sausages in rolls by a waterfall, and plan to invite “everyone” round to theirs this Christmas. There was a time, however, when she didn’t know if life would turn out this way. In 2001, Anna was five and a half months pregnant when she miscarried while on holiday with Colin in Canada.
“That, without a doubt, is my saddest hour,” she says, her naturally expressive voice deepening and flattening. “Colin and I don’t really talk about it very much, which is maybe our way of handling it. We were in the middle of nowhere of Canada, I was taken to hospital by helicopter but they couldn’t take Colin so he had to drive. It was a real drama and had the worst result.
“I think about him all the time, but I don’t allow myself to get depressed about it because I’m so lucky with the others. I’d like to have another 10 but I know I can’t.
“I’d like to adopt but you need time to go through the process and our lives are a bit mad at the moment. People still tell me ‘I’m sorry’ when they find out I’m adopted, but why be sorry? I’m really lucky. It must have been the hardest thing in the world for my mother to do, but I’ve two fabulous parents.”
And with that, she and Colin are off with the girls to Kelvingrove Park. “We’ve been watching the leaves falling from the trees,” says Anna. “We’re going to make the biggest mountain of leaves and run through them.” Bliss indeed.