Outrageous Homes review: Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen is the perfect fit for this hour of fun, frivolity and poking around in someone else's pantry

This is the man, after all, who turned many a suburban home into a Renaissance palace, or a Queen Anne stately pile during his years on the makeover show Changing Rooms.

Who can forget the dining room he painted plum, hanging portraits of the owners as Nell Gywn and Samuel Pepys on the walls?

This time, Laurence is not the one cladding walls with MDF or hurriedly imagining a Roman fresco in a 1970s semi in Solihull.

He's gadding about the country looking at houses which are outrageous in many different ways – not just gold taps or Palladian porticos, these homes are made up of upcycled or mended items; full of homemade mosaics; or in one case, a do-it-yourself SeaLife Centre.

Or, as Laurence puts it, the show is “a celebratory frolic through the outrageous homes of proud-to-be-different homeowners”.

And Laurence is clearly having the time of his life, poking around these houses, finding the joy in both a crazily-opulent £5m bacchanalian barn and in the down-home, make-do-and-mend aesthetic of art teacher Kath's five-bed semi in Surrey.

The barn – designed and built for counter-culture controversy-monger turned magazine publishing baron Felix Dennis – is a real mind-boggler.

The biggest construction of green oak built in the country for 300 years, it chimes with Dennis's piratical nature, with the centrepiece being a lagoon-style swimming pool – not in some uPVC conservatory at the side, but slap-bang in the middle of the house.

Complete with life-size pirate mannequins and real, preserved palms – empalmed trees, if you will – it's a monument to one man's singular taste, and Laurence clearly adores it.

“Permission to come aboard and parlay,” he drawls to the house's current owner, Dawn, as he louchely lounges against a cannon.

There's a lot of lounging around, as Laurence makes himself comfortable in the 70s-themed home of Estelle, out of an unassuming terrace in Manchester.

He channels his inner Austin Powers as he sprawls across the shagpile, chats with Estelle in while draped across her brown ombre bathtub, and drapes himself across her yellow counter-paned bed.

Before long, he's ruining his lovely satin jacket by taking a fully-clothed dip in the enormous aquarium built bu fish fanatic Jack in his suburban home.

Laurence bombards you with a fusillade of facts – the main tank is 14ft long and 7ft deep, Jack's aquariums hold more than 280 fish and it all cost more than £6,500 – but he's never snarky or condescending, taking great delight in finding people as eccentric and determinedly outlandish as he is.

The only time he turns his nose up at anything is when he says the magnolia room in which Kath's husband Mike hides himself away from the patchwork, multi-colour DIY house she has created.

It's all a massive dose of fun, with Laurence's Lifesyles of the Rich and Famous commentary adding to the overall atmosphere, like a blast of bonhomie.

There is no better game, in an idle moment, than some fantasy house shopping on a certain property website. A game when you can 'ooh' at the ceramic tiger in the living room, or 'eww' at the bare-breasted mermaid in the bedroom.

And Outrageous Homes is that game writ large; an hour of fun, frivolity and the chance to poke out about in someone else's pantry.

It's a Llewelyn-Bowen-fuelled blast, and will leave you smiling from ear to ear.