Zoe Ball breaks silence on shock Radio 2 exit as she oversees beautiful transformation of her £2million seaside residence

Zoe Ball has broken her silence on her shock departure from her BBC Radio 2 show.

The DJ, 55, announced live on air at the weekend she is quitting the weekly slot after just seven months.

Zoe revealed she will host her final Saturday lunchtime show on December 20 – but added she will ‘not disappear completely’ and is set to return to host specials for the station.

She has now spoke out on her dramatic exit, explaining to the Daily Mail she was ‘just stepping back’ from the show – amid speculation she is lined up to take over presenting Strictly Come Dancing.

Speaking from her home in Hove, east Sussex, the presenter said she did not want to comment further on her decision.

Zoe quit Radio 2’s flagship Breakfast Show in November last year after six years to ‘focus on her family’.

She spent the weekend celebrating the birthdays of her children, Nelly, 16, and Woody, 25.

And it is easy to see why Zoe would want to spend more time at home, after overseeing a beautiful transformation of the seaside property since she bought it in March last year for £2million.

Her handsome peach and white stucco house, which has five bedrooms and three bathrooms, used to be split up into several flats, like many other properties on the street.

But after nearly a year of renovations, it has now been transformed into a single, stunning home, with bright, quirky decoration to replace its previous stripped back look.

Zoe posted a series of photos of the transformation on Instagram in April, with the caption: ‘Life lately… Been busy feathering the nest & garden. The house needed some character, colour & warmth, the white & grey original rooms were before Catherine @arior_design worked her wonders.’

The star also thanked the contractors who worked on the property, all of whom are based locally, which Zoe proudly flagged with the hashtags ‘#sussexbusinesses’ and ‘#sussextrades’.

Catherine Smith, director of Brighton-based architecture and interiors firm Arior Design, who designed the renovations, made sure to keep the property’s period features, including its sculptural coving, tiled entryway, fireplace and wooden parquet flooring.

But she injected them with modernity and personality, opting for peach paint and forest green velour furnishings in the living room, along with a vintage film poster, a Persian rug and heaps of unique trinkets decking the built-in shelves.

The earth-toned colour scheme continues into the kitchen, where terracotta walls counterbalance sage cabinetry, and flourishing plants fill the shelves.

The hallway is just as warm and welcoming, with more coral walls, large quirky posters and a bold choice of black for the door frames, radiator and banister pulling together to create a stylish look.

The dark colour scheme continues into the downstairs bathroom, where it is offset with a bright orange fish-themed wallpaper and gold metalwork.

The look of the master bedroom, however, is much lighter, with delicate white curtains, plain cotton and linen bedding, floral wallpaper and more sage built-in cupboards.

The enormous windows throughout the property let the light stream in from the outside – which is just as attractive as the interior.

The back garden used to be entirely covered in astroturf, with a large swimming pool  and little in the way of flowers or shrubbery.

But East Sussex-based landscape gardener Henry Agg, who often shares his tips to his nearly 600,000 Instagram followers, transformed it into an oasis of peace and calm.

Videos he posted to his popular account showed the spacious garden split into zones using buff-coloured gravel and paving stones, with the pool filled in to make way for comfortable seating areas and beds exploding in a riot of colour.

He wrote on Instagram in May: ‘A beautiful garden for a fabulous lady @zoetheball – loved designing and transforming this space.’

The house is also perfectly situated to enjoy the best of both city and country life, sitting only a stone’s throw from both the seafront and Hove train station, from which London is only just over an hour away.

Zoe’s previous six-bedroom home in Ditchling was created by Baron Vladimir de Wolff in the 1920s, and had a swimming pool, tennis court and acres of gardens.

When moving out last year, she put the 18th-century cottage on the market for £1.25million, £275,000 more than she paid for it two years prior.

Before that, in February 2018, the BBC star had lived in a £2.5million beachfront mansion in Brighton.

Her relocation to Hove came as a ‘fresh start’, with a source telling the Daily Mail at the time: ‘Zoe obviously got fed up with life in the country and wanted to move to somewhere a bit more lively.

‘She has become really engrossed in making her house just as she wants it and has been happily ordering furniture and buying bits and bobs to make it perfect.’

And it also purposefully brought her closer to her ex-husband and father of her children Norman Cook, 62, otherwise known by his DJ name Fatboy Slim, who she remains fast friends with.

The couple split in 2016, after 18 years of marriage, with their divorce finalised in 2020, saying they had ‘come to the end of their rainbow’ after ‘many exciting adventures’.

Their relationship was not smooth sailing – they briefly split in 2003 when Zoe had an affair with Norman’s DJ pal Dan Peppe, and she was also pictured months before their divorce sharing a drunken kiss with then-22-year-old Tay Tay Starhz, from British pop boyband Franklin Lake.

But they have always stayed close as co-parents and friends – with Norman even recently calling Zoe his ‘soulmate’, in an interview promoting his autobiography earlier this year.

He told The Mirror: ‘In the 90s, I was having too much fun to think about the next day or the next thing. It was like being on top of a big wave and you had to stay on.

‘But to Zoe I could say, ‘I am a bit scared. Is this not scary?’ We could talk about it as we were thrust into the same spotlight. It was nice to have a soulmate in there with you.’

And as they now both live in Hove, where Norman bought a beachfront cafe in 2013, before selling it in November this year, they have been spending more time together, ditching the wild nights of their youth for calmer hobbies.

Their son Woody told the Daily Mail earlier this year his once ‘crazy party’ parents have been ‘gardening’, ‘doing puzzles’ and ‘working in a local café’, which he said was a ‘funny’ transition to watch.

‘In the last five years, it’s been funny watching my parents take up gardening both of them,’ the budding DJ said.

‘These crazy party people I grew up with are now gardening, making puzzles and working in the local café.

‘It’s very funny to see that transitional period, just as I’m kind of leaving the nest and now at the start of something big for me in music.’

Zoe and Norman met in Ibiza in 1998, when she was there as part of her three-year stint presenting the Radio 1 Breakfast Show, and married the following year.

Their hard-drinking, hard-partying lifestyle saw her dubbed the poster girl of the so-called ‘ladette’ culture of the nineties – and left her, she has previously admitted, with only ‘vague memories’ of her time leading the high-profile slot.

She went to rehab, which she credits with her recovery from addiction, before eventually quitting drinking entirely, alongside Norman, when their daughter Nelly was born in 2010.

Zoe has previously said: ‘The fact we hadn’t managed to have another child for all those years and then Nelly was conceived when we gave up the booze must be linked. It felt like our reward. Very much so.’

After she split from Norman, she began dating her long-time friend Billy Yates in 2017, but he tragically died by suicide that year after a long battle with depression.

In an emotional 2020 interview, the star admitted his death was ‘the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with in my life’.

Zoe went on to date model Michael Reed, but they split in 2023, with sources claiming the relationship began to break down after he became ‘a bit demanding‘.

And in April last year, the presenter’s mother Julia, who she was estranged from for many years, sadly passed away after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

Zoe’s parents divorced when she was just two and she was raised primarily by her father and stepmother Di, who both always said she could see her mother – but Zoe herself was not keen.

She did not see her mother from the age of five until her late teens and only fully reconciled after Zoe accepted an invitation to her 40th birthday party in the late nineties.

The DJ was forced to take time off from her Radio 2 breakfast show last year in the wake of her mother’s death, before she fully stepped down and was replaced by BBC radio veteran Scott Mills, 52.

She opened up earlier this year about the sheer impact her mother’s passing had on her, revealing her leave of absence came after a breakdown.

Speaking on her lifestyle podcast Dig It, which she co-hosts with fellow BBC radio DJ Jo Whiley, 60, Zoe said: ‘I couldn’t work. I was on the floor in the kitchen. I couldn’t, I couldn’t move.

‘I had a proper emotional breakdown, you know, I haven’t really talked about it actually. But it was, yeah, it was brutal.’

Perhaps these years of trauma are why sources have told the Daily Mail’s Katie Hind today that Zoe’s priority now is to enjoy the tight-knight family support system she has built on the Sussex coast.

‘Zoe loves her life in Hove, she is looking to do less and spend more time with her children, not work more,’ one said.