DEBBIE TRAVIS LAUGH IT UP

You’re somehow always missing one shoe,” Debbie Travis jokes when asked what it’s like to live in three places at once.

- SARAH TRUMBLEY

The decorating guru and lifestyle television pioneer has houses in London, Toronto and Tuscany, but it’s the latter that feels most like home. “I spend most of my time there now – I just love being in the countryside,” gushes the former model, 64, who used her interior design chops to turn a tumbledown 13th-century farmhouse into Villa Reniella, a gorgeous home and boutique hotel in the Tuscan hills from which she’s been running women’s retreats for more than 10 years.

It’s the retreats, she says, that inspired her latest memoir, Laugh More, which sees her share funny stories about her adventures in Tuscany while reminding readers about the importance of finding humour in life’s ups and downs. Here, British-born Debbie – who moved to Montreal in the mid-’80s, when she married TV producer Hans Rosenstein (the father of her sons, Josh, 37, and Max, 36) – talks more about the book and gives us a happy look inside her Italian life.