Olivia Bowen: ‘Property investing was my way of escaping Love Island’

When Olivia Bowen was a little girl, her mum used to drive past a beautiful house in her Essex home town. “It was my dream house,” Bowen reminisces. “Very grand with big gates, the kind of house I would want to live in for ever.”
This was perhaps a far-fetched dream for a 22-year-old working in sales. But after she and Alex, who are now married, were crowned runners-up in season two of ITV’s hit dating show Love Island in 2016, everything changed.
The Bowens bought their first home for about £800,000 in Chelmsford, Essex, in 2017. Influencing was a less saturated market then than it is today, and Bowen was making tens of thousands of pounds in brand partnerships. The couple also bagged their own TLC TV show, Olivia and Alex Said Yes, in 2018.
Then, when her childhood dream house came up for sale in 2020, they bought it. In the same year they also invested £128,000 in a one-bedroom property in Birmingham to renovate and rent out. This was followed in 2021 by a three-bedroom rental property for £175,000. Now, after four years as successful landlords, they are planning on purchasing four more two-bedroom properties in Manchester over the next two months to start growing their buy-to-let property portfolio. It is the interior designing that Bowen loves most and she is budgeting about £15,000 per house to ensure they are ready to rent out.
“I know Love Island won’t last for ever. I’ve got my [influencing] career, which I absolutely adore, but I know things are going to change. Interior design has become something that I want to do with my life,” Bowen, 30, says. “My dad always instilled the importance of property into me and I had that in the back of my mind. So when I fell in love with interior design, they [property and design] went together perfectly.”
Bowen dipped her toe in all things interiors with their first home, but has since transformed her hobby into a passion. “I was absolutely awful [at interior design] when we bought our first home. I couldn’t put colours together or furniture in a room,” she says. “I made so many interior mistakes, so when I saw my dream house come up for sale in 2020, I knew it was the one because the house we were in really didn’t feel right.”
The couple sold up and upgraded to her childhood dream house for just over £1 million. “It was a complete renovation job and needed everything done to it. Covid hit and we were stuck in lockdown, but luckily labourers and tradesmen could still work,” she says.
“I studied interior design during the pandemic so I could do it properly. It completely changed the way I managed the design of the house and it was the catalyst that started my absolute love of interiors and property.”
She completed her online diploma in three months. “It was very practical and the teachers would mark your work and give feedback. It was really, really great,” Bowen explains. “The course taught me to look at a room as a feeling rather than how you want it to look. It’s all through the colours and textures. You could see a nice grey sofa and like it, but if you want the room to feel cosy it’s not going to give you what you want.”
She then began to document their home-building progress on a new Instagram page, @thebowenhome, which now has 742,000 followers. She has posted more than 500 photos since 2020, including before-and-after pictures, as well as inspiration, links to the designers and items, and discount codes.
Four years and one baby boy later, Bowen began to get itchy feet and was ready to take the next step in her property journey: designing her own home. They sold their existing space for £500,000 more than they bought it for and bought a plot in Essex for £250,000 in June 2023.
“The house was finished in a year because it was already a quarter built when we took over, so it was a little easier for us than going from the ground up. We could have changed it more, but we liked how it was going. It took about ten months to complete the build,” she says.
Now Bowen is working her way through the house, designing the interiors room by room.
“I just wanted it to be a family hub of cosiness and cleanliness. I wanted loads of grainy wood, warm tones and wooden beams. My whole life has changed. Our old home was us as a couple and this house is really about being a family,” she says.
She gets a lot of her inspiration from the hotels, gardens and countries she visited during her influencing career. The bathrooms were the first on her list and were designed and completed before they moved in two months ago. “The downstairs bathroom was a fun little project in an Italian theme with terracotta tiles. I limewashed the walls and we’ve added these hand-painted Italian style tiles.”
Mood boards are one of Bowen’s must-dos when designing so she can get a feel for a room and how the textures and patterns go together. Her original main en suite bathroom mood board featured Ca’ Pietra tiling in golds and greens and units from MyLife Bathrooms.
“I just want colour everywhere, different textures and patterns. Moving into a new-build makes it quite hard to visualise that but hopefully we’ll get there. I started by working out what feeling I wanted in each room. Do I want to feel tranquil? Do I want to feel excited? Warm? Cold? Then I’ll go out and look at colours and textures that evoke the feeling and look at my previous Pinterest boards, then collate it into a mood board,” she says.
“When we moved in the kitchen was the first room to be fully designed. I knew exactly what I wanted — a country oak, calm, tranquil and warm space. It looks exactly how I pictured it, which is quite hard to make happen.” It features a limestone-style floor made of porcelain by Ca’ Pietra, oak shelves and an oak island designed by a local company, Rockwood Kitchens.
Separating the kitchen and dining area is a 160kg barn door that pulls along on a wheel mechanism to match the oak in the kitchen and wooden beams around the house. The dining room hasn’t been completed yet, except for the dining table, which is a bespoke marble centrepiece by Steve Bristow Furniture. The Bowens plan to use a teal colour scheme and add a built-in bookcase and bar.
“We really love our greens. Our main bedroom will have a nice olive green, which is such a calming colour, and we’ve also gone for a lot of pattern clashing with geometrics, florals and stripes — it’s starting to take shape.
“Sampling is also one of my biggest must-dos, especially in bathrooms with tiles, as well as items that you’re going to spend a lot of money on like sofas. I went through a stage of never getting samples and nothing would ever match. Suppliers want you to have samples for free for a reason. Then you can collate a physical board to work from. For my bathrooms I would get all my tiles, towels and paints, and in our bedroom I would have cushion samples — you start to really get a feel for it,” Bowen explains.
“I’ll start shopping and sourcing different items. If it’s a quicker job I won’t really look at budget, but if there’s a lot to be done we’ll plan a budget and I’ll start looking into suppliers and curate a board with the exact products and how much they are. I’ll often buy the most important piece of furniture like a dining table or sofa first because they’re investment pieces and something you should spend a bit of money on,” she adds.
“You’re put in a box when you go on Love Island, but I don’t want that,” Bowen says. “I want to invest in property and I want to be an interior designer, so that’s what I’m going to do.
“My mum has always said to me, ‘You will get where you want to go because you are formidable in that way. You won’t stop, you have it in your mind and it will happen because you are constantly putting it into existence.”