IF YOU haven’t yet heard of Katharine Pooley, you soon will. Pooley, erstwhile banker, adventurer and author of an unusual cookbook-cum-travelogue, A Taste of My World, is launching her eponymous Knightsbridge shop.

Dedicated to luxurious living and interiors, it will sell furnishings from Vietnamese tableware to Japanese antique kimono cushions and offers an upmarket interior design service.

“You’ll be able to buy everything you see here,” says thirtysomething Pooley, sitting in her stylish home with its fusion of East and West, contemporary and traditional. “I’m opening the shop because people keep asking where I get these beautiful things.”

So where does she get them? A mixture of everywhere, from the Parisian Marche aux Puces (for Louis XIV) to Bangkok market (gilt Buddhas and suchlike) and Burmese shops (good for Cambodian nick-nacks).

Not to mention the other places she comes across when dog-sledding in Alaska, horseback trekking in Ecuador or visiting Cambodian orphans: this is a woman who flies helicopters, shoots, cooks professionally and intends to climb Mount Everest.

In a cream Ralph Lauren wool skirt, matching sleeveless cashmere jumper, large solitaire diamond and strappy snakeskin shoes, Pooley’s sartorial style matches the décor in her Belgravia home. It is tranquil, fresh, clean and sophisticated, with buttermilk paint, taupe suede curtains, atmospheric John Cullen Design lighting, old limestone and wood floors and almond carpet throughout. Plus lots of Eastern artefacts.

When Pooley and her investment banker husband, Rob, saw the Belgravia house, they instantly fell for it. It was made up of three early-Victorian mews houses that had been knocked into one and entered through a secluded courtyard. “We loved it because it was on two floors,” explains Pooley. “We only saw one other house before buying it.” That was three years ago, when the couple – who also own a Colorado ski lodge, Phuket villa and a Scottish castle – were living in their house in Singapore.

When they bought the property, two men had lived there. “It had just two bedrooms and one bathroom.

Their bedrooms ran the length of the (4,200sq ft) house.”

Pooley’s business partner, Kerry Stone, helped to transform the house into a five-bedroom home with ample entertaining space. “We rewired, knocked through three rooms to make a family room, put three French windows in the drawing room, extended to build a study, made two more bathrooms and a laundry room and drying room.”

THE renovation work took 18 months and the couple moved in, with their four dogs, only two months ago.

No children? “We’re practising making them,” laughs Pooley, who married in 2002.

The drawing room reveals an eclectic mix of first-edition books, 17th-century hats, comfy sofas, zebraskin coffee table, Eastern antiquities, modern Asian sculptures, a massive, contemporary Chinese painting of Communist Party members by Yin Xin and a grand piano. “Mozart played on it. I took piano lessons so that I could surprise my husband on his 40th birthday,” giggles Pooley. “But everyone begged me to stop playing.”

There are silver-framed photos on top of the piano: “That’s the lady who introduced me to my husband on a blind date,” she says, pointing.

“That’s my grandfather. He invented the epidural.”

The drawing room is big enough to incorporate most of the members of the Royal Geographic Society. “I’m hoping to host a party for them,” she says, excitedly. “There’ll be a chocolate fountain, lectures and lots of explorers.” And a £25,000 homecinema installed by then.

Next door, the £75,000 Smallbone family room has a central island and work surfaces covered in unfinished, textured granite, a bespoke Ralph Lauren chest as a coffee table, Sub-Zero and Gaggenau appliances and limitededition photographs of Edmund Hillary’s Everest expedition. It leads onto a formal dining room containing a mixture of Asian antiquities and English 18th century furniture: a Chippendale dining table sits alongside a Burmese chest and six Burmese Mantra statues and English antique dining chairs are stacked with Eastern cushions.

The eclectic mix is repeated upstairs. In their bedroom are antique Asian bedside tables and bench, Vietnamese art, their wedding music framed on the wall, a Louis Vuitton trunk and an antique Scottish voting box.

The D C Dot Company bathroom has black slate walls, walnut cabinets and a limestone floor fringed with beach stones. “Rob wanted dark surfaces for masculinity. I wanted light for femininity.” It boasts a wet-room with overhead shower and vertical water jets, and a Victorian roll-top bath. “Another compromise,” laughs Pooley, who hails from Scotland. “I wanted a bath. But Rob is American.”

The meeting of cultures, styles and interests is everywhere. There’s the planned-for children’s bedroom, with a Chinese opium bed and rare Emperor’s crib; a guestroom with antique European sleigh bed and an attic housing mountaineering and golfing equipment.

And in the courtyard? Well, there’s an old French fountain to aid thirsty dogs and for feng shui, an English stone bench and a red Hong Kong rickshaw. “I spent 15 years in the East,” explains Pooley. “I keep thinking I’m just on holiday here.”

Katharine Pooley, 160 Walton Street, SW3 (020 7584 3223; enquiries katharinepooley.com; www.katharinepooley.com)

Where Katharine Pooley shops

FOR MY LONDON HOME Lighting: Sally Storey at John Cullen Lighting (020 7371 5400) English 18th century antiques: Ronald Phillips (020 7493 2341; email ronaldphillipsltd.co.uk) Carpet: Ulster Carpets (0808 100 0979; www.ulstercarpets.com) Floors: Drummond’s Architectural Antiques (020 7376 4499; www.drummonds-arch.co.uk) Beds: Sophisto-Cat Furniture (020 7731 2221) Kitchen: Smallbone of Devizes (020 7581 9989; www.smallbone.co.uk)

EUROPE

In Paris, I love the antiques square Le Louvre des Antiquaires in Place du Palais Royal (0033 142 975 5212), especially Galerie Heritages, which sells the best range of antique clubstyle chairs. In London, I love Soo San, 598a King’s Road (020 7731 2063), which has a superb collection of antique Chinese furniture and art.

WORLDWIDE

Lotus: Singapore and Thailand (www.lotusartsdevivre.com).

Exquisite accessories and gifts.

Soul of Asia: Phuket (0066 7621 1122; email: info@soulofasia.com web; www.soulofasiathailandartgallery.com). Wonderful Asian art and antiques.

Pagoda House: Singapore (0065 732 2177; www.pagodahouse.com). Marvellous collection of art de vivre and antiques focusing on the south of Asia, Indonesia, Burma and Cambodia.

WHEN fashion designers Martin Barrell and his partner, Amanda Sellers, found their north London apartment in 2001, they immediately decided that they wanted it. It was not the fact that, apart from a dribble of paint, it had not been touched for 25 years, nor was it the shoddy conversion that swayed them. It was the 75-foot outdoor space full of supermarket trolleys, knee-high weeds, old sheds and rusty bicycles that clinched it.

“For five years in our Notting Hill flat, we’d looked down at people enjoying barbecues and thought, ‘That’s what we want to do’,” says Barrell. Now he has a beautiful cottage garden, created by Sellers, in which to sizzle sausages.

The couple own Maisonette, the ironically titled suburban-glamour homestore in Kensal Rise.

Think decorative: retro, modern and vintage; it stocks, among other things, cushions made from scarves, 1970s sideboards and paintings. Their home has a strong Sixties and Seventies influence, and is a testing ground for their shop.

“We like to see what things look like in a home environment,” says Barrell, who only sells pieces he likes. “We don’t go for the Austin Powers pop look. We’re into subdued designs.”

When the couple bought their apartment, they had a budget of £35,000 for building works. They started by reconfiguring the property, turning what was a three-bedroom flat into a two bedroom one by putting a bathroom in what was the third bedroom. They also converted two other rooms into a kitchen.

“We put in sash windows and new doors, and took off some other doors to open things up,” explains Barrell, who did the spec drawings for the builders. “We stripped, rewired, replumbed, replastered and, well, re-everything.”

Then the couple painted the wooden floorboards Farrow & Ball black and the walls Dulux white. “We wanted to work off a blank canvas.” A blank canvas in a late-Victorian home with period features.

The couple have been clever at taking low-cost interior pieces and using them in a way that makes them look expensive.

In the kitchen, they have used glossy white Magnet units – including three freezer units, which create a stylish wall of cupboards – with an economical laminate worktop. “It’s £160 on work-surfaces, rather than £4,500 on Corian,” says Barrell.

In the bedroom, he has eight Ikea mirrored wardrobes.

“If you use something en masse, you make a big statement with it.”

Even the hospital-style radiators are from B&Q – juxtaposed with two stylish Bisque ones, which raise the tone.

Against this backdrop are dramatic, vintage accessories.

Throughout the flat are spectacular light fittings: in the bedroom, two 1960s tiered, textured Murano glass wall lights from Les Couilles Du Chien, while in the bathroom, a 1970s Murano glass chandelier from vintage light specialist Ollie’s “that weighs a ton”.

In the sitting room, a pair of vintage glass wall lights glow beautifully, while in the dining room, a sequin-style bronze-tinted glass pendant light hangs from the ceiling. The overall look is simple, but decorative. In the sitting room, Barrell and Sellers have two 1960s chrome-and-leather Pieff sofas, offset by a sequinned Geraldine Larkin cushion.

“She designs embroidery for couture clients and a small range of interiors pieces,” Barrell says. The sitting room also has a Danish rosewood sideboard, vintage chrome-and-rosewood coffee table, and, for warmth, sheepskin rugs and cushions made from silk scarves. On the wall is a large, retro still-life of painting-by-numbers flowers, designed by Barrell and sold as a DIY kit in the couple’s shop for £130.

Vases and a brass cherub candelabra sit on the imposing Victorian Carrara marble mantelpiece, above the fireplace.

“When we moved in, the fireplaces were all 1930s tiled ones,” Barrell says. “We found the originals in bits in the cellar. So we got this [marble one] from Retrouvius reclamation.”

The dining room is open-plan with a 1960s Arkana table and matching swivel chairs. Above the table, a Geraldine Larkin hand-stitched sequin panel echoes the room’s slightly goldenbrown Italian chandelier.

ELSEWHERE, along the exposed-brick hallway (“It was like that when we bought it. We love its textural feel”), in which a 1960s Pieff dining chair is placed, lies the master bedroom. It has a theatrical 1950s Italian gilt-and-white painted chest, French 1930s painted bed and huge black sheepskin rugs.

Sellers’s vintage shoes, clothes and handbags, hanging off handles and placed on boxes, provide a further dramatic touch.

In the corner is a Charles Eames chair. “It’s rare because it’s finished in chrome,” says Barrell.

The bathroom is lined with inexpensive white tiles and featuring a sunken Bette bath, which has towel storage in its side panel. “The bathroom floor was seven inches lower than the rest of the flat,” says Barrell. “So we left the bath at that level.”

Italian mock-slate covers the floor, which, says Barrell, is “more economical and durable than slate, because it’s made of ceramic”. And, “for hiding everything”, there is a a wall of mirror-fronted, bespoke cupboards, lit from beneath.

There is one other thing that is hidden. Secreted behind a door, there is a labyrinthian cellar-cum-studio, from where Barrell creates his floral canvases, and looks up happily at his barbecue.

WHERE TO GET THE LOOK

For 20th century design
Maisonette: 79 Chamberlayne Road, NW10 (020 8964 8444; www.maisonette.uk.com)
www.sit-on-it.uk.com: 07815 841573
Les Couilles Du Chien: 65 Golborne Road, W10 (020 8968 0099)
Repsycho: 85 Gloucester Road, Bristol (0117 983 0007)

For vintage lights
Ollie’s: 69 Golborne Road, W10 (07768 790 725)

For the bathroom
MC Stone: 69a Goldney Road, W9 (020 7289 7102)
The Tile Shop: 4-6 Chamberlayne Road, NW10 (020 8968 9497)

Paints
Farrow & Ball: 01202 876141; www.farrow-ball.com
Dulux: 01753 550555; www.dulux.co.uk

Interior designer Amber Galloway took just 10 days to turn a rodent-infested mill into a dreamy home where she combines ancient and modern with flair, says Caroline Phillips MICE scuttled across the floor and water was pouring down the walls when Amber Galloway first saw her new home. “It was infested with rodents,” she says.

She had been in the process of buying two local Fifties cottages, which she had intended to demolish in order to build a Long Island-style clapboard, eco house. “But when I saw this, it was love at first sight,” she says without irony. It is an idyllic 1 8 0 0 s f orme r working mill with a river running through its garden, near Hook in Hampshire.

Galloway, 37, is an interior decorator and director of Global & Gorgeous – an online, mostly bespoke, shopping business selling homeware with a very individual style.

She is a woman who likes to do things differently.

She works on a * aptop in the house or in the garden, where she grows her own vegetables. She chooses everything from paint and furniture to bed linen and china for her decorating clients.

And she lives with her five-year-old son, Oliver, a male au pair and his girlfriend Inge, as well as two Labradors and Harry Potter, the cat. “I like privacy, but this works astonishingly well,” she says.

Even the move to her new home was unconventional. She had been living in Chelsea in a property she had finished renovating two years previously, having bought it in a dilapidated state. In September 2000, she let out her home and rented the bucolic retreat.

“I had 10 days in which to move out of London and make this house habitable,” Galloway explains. “Oliver was tiny, at mouth-level to the exhaust fumes. It was time to go.”

She hired four Polish labourers to live onsite. “My ex-husband, friends and I worked through each night after work. Ten of us stayed here, ripping it apart, blitzing and filling skips.” In record time, they stripped wooden floors, painted others, replaced light fittings and covered the ceilings, walls and woodwork with Farrow & Ball Toffee paint.

“With such low ceilings, it is better not to differentiate the colours,” she says. ” We didn’t fill or prepare the walls, just slapped on the paint. Unusually, I did the paintwork first and found the fabrics afterwards.”

She fitted neutral carpet (” 100 per cent nylon, £6 a metre,” she laughs) and a stripy Roger Oates runner on the stairs. She even got down on her knees and “squished mosaic tiles that were left over from six different jobs” – to create an artistic wet-room floor.

She used plain fabrics for the curtains: James Brindley’s natural pure silk tussah weave at £21 a metre.

“Good curtains are all about interlining and the way you hang them.”

With only a few hours left before moving in, she had to borrow furniture. “I’d rented out my London house furnished,” she says. Six months later, she sold that home and moved her furniture to Hampshire.

The eclectic character of her home comes from the combination of period features with her catholic collection of furniture, pictures and objets.

Her sitting room boasts an enormous open fireplace, traditional chenille armchairs (from a George Smith job lot), a battered Seventies leather Knoll sofa and leather coffee table juxtaposed with the Power Napper, a massive handmade calves’ leather floor cushion she sells for £1,200, and contemporary art from the Serpentine Gallery.

As a contrast, her dining room borders on the tastefully whacky. It has a large circular glass table with a tree trunk as its base; a William Yeoward string console table; an antique candleonly chandelier; c o n t e m p o r a r y t h r e e – m e t a l sconces made by a blacksmith and two 19th century sunburst gilt mirrors with an antique carriage lantern in the middle.

“I never buy objects for their value, just things I like the look of.” Next door, the kitchen has beams and a 19th century fireplace-cum-oven (“When it rains, it buckets down there”) and a wooden settle and clothes pulley, alongside Habitat steel shelves. “I can have 16 people for dinner; we just move between the kitchen and dining areas,” she says.

Upstairs, there are sensational beds everywhere: a Louis XVI-style day bed for her son; a 19th century mahogany with pediment for the au pair; brass in the guest room and a beautiful Empire bed in the master bedroom, where Galloway also has an Empire mahogany wardrobe, antique chaise-longue, 19th century Moroccan marquetry table and a Sixties Teasmade. Also there are framed panels from a decoupage screen she had as an infant. “As a child,” she says, “I’d ask for junk-shop finds rather than Barbie dolls as birthday presents.”

HER eclectic style is emphasised in her bathroom with its freestanding, clawfooted Victorian bath and Conran whiteenamel cube cabinet. Only the guest room is traditional, with a headboard made from French flea-market linen and crowned with a carved wooden mantelpiece, antique knickknacks and Global & Gorgeous muslin cushions and cotton bedcover.

The overall look is stylish and welcoming. “What you have on the walls and floor are immaterial,” she says. “I prefer to spend money on collecting things.

“Sometimes I go into clients’ houses and just move the furniture around, rehang the pictures – and completely transform their places.”

THERE are high-rise council flats, industrial gas turbines and a superstore on his Vauxhall doorstep. But Madonna, Elton John and Elle Macpherson love his home. Once past his oversized metal door, you enter a surreal world: a 26,000sq ft former handbag factory. The factory is now a stylish home, office and gallery, where the contemporary furniture exhibition, Mattia Bonetti: a Collaboration with David Gill, is showing from 10 June.

The space belongs to curator, style guru and furniture and interior designer David Gill, a fortysomething art historian who started his career at Christie’s and specialises in revolutionary furniture designers of the 1920s and 1930s. He is also a patron and promoter of new talent, and works closely with his artists, overseeing the design, execution and interpretation of works.

When Gill first saw the factory it had fallen into disrepair.

“Habitat’s designer, Tom Dixon, worked in part of it. The rest had been empty for years. It was derelict,” says Gill, speaking rapidly in his Spanish accent (of Dutch and Spanish origins, Gill spent his childhood in various European capitals). Dixon did not want to buy the factory and Gill was looking for a place for the overspill furniture from his eponymous Fulham Road gallery, where he sells 20th and 21st century decorative art from around the world.

Gill, a self-made man who has always relied on his good eye and intuition to make money, bought the property in 1995.

“I can’t remember how much I paid for it,” he claims. Two years later he got to work masterminding the building works: gutting the property, but retaining its enormous steel girders and original industrial windows. “I worked with the architect,” he says. “I had clear ideas about volumes, walls, types of doors and finishes.” Even the metal banisters and staircases were commissioned to his specification. “A metal engineer lived in the building for a year and built everything,” he says.

By 1999, Gill had turned the factory into a gallery, open-plan office and 2,000sq ft apartment. In the apartment, he constructed three walls, around which he created an L-shaped reception/dining area, bedroom, guest room, wetroom and industrial kitchen. There are no doors: “They restrict your movement,” says Gill. The apartment has exposed beams, polished concrete floors and high ceilings. The walls are white and the window frames grey. “But colour is important,” he explains. He has added highlights of red, yellow, green, turquoise and burgundy.

Gill calls his flat a “studio-in-progress” displaying art and using furniture in it before selling the items. Richard Synder’s Love Slave Box, for instance, was used to separate the hallway from the dinning area, but was recently bought by a collector, so now the artist’s wooden Magician’s Phoenician Chest has taken its place. “Still not right,” tuts Gill. Nearby are Madonna’s shoes, signed and in a glass case. (“Are you certain that’s my signature?” Madonna teased when she visited.) Above Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Piggy Back sculpture hangs Sarah Lucas’s photograph, Complete Arsehole. Count the naked bodies and breasts in Gill’s flat and you would be there for ages.

The look is idiosyncratic and individual. The eight-foot-high Ink Pad by Abigail Lane hangs above the dining table; beside it, a Virgin Mary with a dagger sticking out of her is wrapped in plastic police tape. Gill has Swiss chalet dining chairs by the late French designer Charlotte Perriand, who during her life worked extensively with Le Corbusier, and a Garouste & Bonetti 12-seater oval dining table with a bronze and scagliola top.

Called Salome, he sells it in the gallery for £9,000, but uses one for his dinner parties. When he wants to invite more people, he takes them downstairs to the gallery. Recently he had a sit-down dinner there for 140.

The reception area has a 1930s Eugene Printz sofa covered in burgundy silk velvet, a 1925 Baroque Venetian stucco chair in green satin and gilt, and a stainless-steel and glass “ring” coffee table. “It was Garouste & Bonetti’s last collaboration,” Gill says.

Art books are piled on three contemporary Grillo Demo console tables that run the length of the windows. There is lots of light: natural, low-level and theatre spots. “Spots are flexible,” Gill says. “They allow me to create my lighting at will.”

IN THE bedroom Gill made his white leather bed. It appears to float, thanks to the fluorescent tubes underneath it and behind the bedhead. “I wanted to create the ultimate reading light,” he explains. The room also has a large flat-screen television, a 1960s fibreglass and brown leather chair, and a vast picture of Michael Jackson by the artist Paul McCarthy, beside the bed.

The wetroom has limestone floors and a stone bench that is “very comfortable to sit on and have a shower”. The concrete walls are painted cream. Gill designed the granite sink and there is an enormous Paul McCarthy latex sculpture of a penis and vagina; “to remind me of where I came from,” laughs Gill.

Everywhere you look, there are collector pieces. The stainlesssteel kitchen boasts a Le Corbusier table, Jean Prouvé chairs and an atmospheric 1950s Serge Mouille black lacquered aluminium mobile light. Even the guest room houses Jean Cocteau ceramics and Man Ray and Brassai photographs.

But Gill feels cramped; next year he plans to build a 6,500sq ft penthouse on his roof. “Ahh, that’ll be such an exciting project,” he concludes happily.

HOW TO GET THE LOOK Mattia Bonetti: a Collaboration with David Gill: original, playful and kitsch furniture by Mattia Bonetti, showing from 10 June to 3 July, at 3 Loughborough Street, SE11 (020 7793 1100).

David Gill Gallery: 20th century and contemporary furniture, objects and jewellery. Period pieces by 1950s designers including Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé.

By appointment at 60 Fulham Road, SW3 (020 7589 5946).

Wetroom: from Fired Earth, which has more than 50 showrooms. Call 01295 814399 for your nearest store.

Lighting: Sally Storey’s design service at John Cullen Lighting. Its showroom can simulate almost any lighting mood you want. 585 King’s Road, SW6 (020 7371 5400).

Kitchen: Alternative Plans supplies contemporary kitchens by Italian manufacturer Boffi and German manufacturer Hacker. Call 020 7228 6460, or visit www.alternative-plans.co.uk.

Bed: for one similar to David Gill’s, try Viaduct, which sells a variety of white leather beds, including three styles from Cappellini. 1-10 Summer’s Street, EC1 (020 7278 8456).

Bathroom: Granite & Marble International, 35 Pensbury Place, Westminster House, SW8 (020 7498 2742).

CHAMPAGNE AS PART of Art Fortnight London, two weeks of events and exhibitions from 21 June to 5 July, which celebrate London as art capital of the world, Homes & Property is offering a pair of tickets to one of the exclusive events – A Collector at Home, a champagne reception hosted by David Gill, dealer, curator and collector, in his gallery in south London. The event will take place on 25 June from 7pm to 9pm.

Gill’s collection includes a number of important works by contemporary artists, including Paul McCarthy (famed for his Blockhead installation outside Tate Modern last year) and the latest collection of art furniture by Mattia Bonetti.

How to enter: Send your name, address, and contact phone number on a postcard to: H&P Evening, Art Fortnight London, 44 Duke’s Street, St James’s, London SW1Y 6DD, by Wednesday 9 June. The winner will be notified by Friday 11 June.

PAINT specialist Joa Studholme and interior designer and house surgeon Suzy Maas came together to provide a radical, low-budget makeover for a tired two-bedroom basement flat in Kensington. Previously valued at £400,000, by property expert and local estate agent Eve Wilton of Aylesfords, what would this flat be worth after its expert makeover? Read on…

When Joa and Suzy visited the flat in a small cul de sac off Kensington Church Street, they discovered a dowdy, dated property. Joa says: “It was so Eighties, full of rag-rolling, skyandclouds trompe l’oeil on the hall ceiling, gilded cornices and stencilling everywhere, with hideous, highly polished orangey furniture. The doors and cupboards had tarnished brass fittings, the fireplace was a morbid black marble, and the sofa was covered in blue satin brocade.”

Now the flat is light, bright and fabulously contemporary, and appears much larger. A great result for only £15,000. How did they do it? Joa works for paint maker Farrow & Ball. Her job is to advise homeowners on paint colours, finishes and wallpaper combinations.

“If someone asks for ‘neutral’, I look at their clothes for clues,” she says. Joa herself wears Chinese Blue and Breakfast Room Green vintage garb. She charges £90 an hour or £500 per day – with the flat, she took only two hours to work out an entire colour scheme.

Suzy is managing director of The Final Touch, which renovates properties for sale or rental. She does everything from large structural changes and clearing clutter to redecorating, or replacing the garden fence. She charges £75 for a consultation or £475 a day. Suzy draws as much on her own experience of multiple house-building and moving as on her training as an interior designer. Now, propert ies she tackles sell for up to 15 per cent above their original asking price.

At the flat, Joa zipped through the rooms, painting over the furniture and woodwork with Farrow & Ball’s specialist paints. She skilfully blended colours to give an illusion of larger spaces and, very cleverly, used strips of wallpaper to back bookshelves to save time and money.

Suzy, meanwhile, whizzed through spring cleaning, substituting dingy light fittings, cleaning white carpets and making a huge impression with chocolate-brown faux suede re-upholstery, and pink satin cushions. A small and charming French antique mirror, costing £40, was painted white and placed above a bureau to add a classy touch. She has an impressive contacts book and can save a client hours by knowing just where to buy the right item.

Generous pinch-pleated curtains in rich mocha faux suede were a bargain at £8.50 a metre. New door furniture in fresh glass was delightful, as were the modern stand a rd lamps. She didn’t buy any large furniture, instead she painted what was there. “The one thing we needed was light. Just exchanging dusty, heavy nets for cream Cosmo blinds gives a pretty diffused light,” she says.

Joa also went for light, but not by using white, as many of us would. “You can’t use overt white in a basement. You have to go with what nature gives you, otherwise it looks wrong,” she explains. “And don’t paint ceilings white because your eye is drawn to the contrast, and take wall colour over the cornice to give height.”

SHADES of the colour palette used in the hall were brought into the drawing room to create continuity. The Farrow & Ball paints, with their famous clotted cream, tactile chalky finish, provide their own expensive, contemporary effect. She chose Off White, with a contrastingly darker tone on the bookcase and an even darker one on the fireplace. “The walls, skirting and window frames are the same colour.

It makes a room look bigger.”

A similar deft approach gave the gloomy master bedroom an uptodate, Swedish look. Its cold lavender walls were exchanged for the warmth of Pale Powder, a calm shade of soft blue/turquoise. The cupboards were painted to ” disappear” and the 1980s yellow-with-ahintof-blue furniture transformed by Off White. Shutters were painted with the same Pale Powder and Suzy hung pretty white muslin strips over the windows from discreet rods. The wall behind the bedroom shelves was treated to the same trick with strips of wallpaper, this time in romantic Ivy Paper.

The small, dark bathroom’s makeover was masterly. No one without Joa’s knowledge would have used the striking Silvergate ( washable) wallpaper, Light Grey paint on the woodwork or the ceiling’s Slipper Satin. “Large patterns work very well in small spaces, and the woodwork in gloss is very contemporary – as well as practical, and a contrast to the matt wallpaper. When there’s no natural light, it works to use stronger, darker materials. But this bathroom opens onto the hall and is too small for a colour change.” So she used the same shades.

The hallway, like so many London flats, was long, dark and narrow. Now it is an exciting space, thanks to the clever use of neutral colours – from Slipper Satin to Mouse’s Back. “The lobby is darker, so that the eye reads the lighter hall as bigger and brighter,” says Joa.

Suzy added the finishing touch with economical cream runners from Habitat laid on the wood floors. “A lot of house doctors put in oat carpets, calico curtains and magnolia walls,” concludes Suzy. “But they lose the personality and oomph of a property, which can mean that it doesn’t stand up to the competition.”

WHEN Ian and Claire Hogarth bought their South Kensington basement flat in 2002, it had not been touched since 1936. The peeling walls dripped with damp – a fan was on permanently to alleviate the smell – and it had concrete floors, but no telephone line nor television aerial.

In just four months Ian turned the £350,000 property into a bright, stylish and ultramodern space – now housing the couple, their five- and eight-year-old children and Hogarth Architects, Ian’s practice.

Measuring just 1,475 sq ft, this is compact living. But Ian waved his architectural wand and made the flat lighter and seemingly bigger. He demolished the supporting wall of the 80ft corridor: “A big statement,” says Ian, in his Yorkshire accent. “But the structural opening allowed me to move the kitchen into the corridor and make the living area open plan.” He also removed part of the roof at the back, creating a courtyard and natural light for the bedrooms. “I wanted the space to be sensual and light.”

He made a “Blackpool illuminations” corridor – using a playful lighting feature that alters its colour from green to purple and blue – and put an ever-changing sequence of rainbow lights in the children’s bedroom, illuminations under sofas and pink fluorescent tubes behind the bath panel.

“One Cardio System computer-controlled button operates the lights, heating, music and security,” laughs Claire, a former picture editor. “You can access it from anywhere in the world with a mobile. Ian’s still experimenting with different settings and colours.”

Going further in the name of big, bright and light, Ian introduced glossy white rubber floors throughout and white Corian kitchen surfaces with a white basin (all for visual continuity), and painted everything white to reflect the light. Even the bespoke plywood and white formica dining table was put at the window as a “light bouncer” and the grey – and therefore light-sapping – plasma screen was carefully concealed.

Everything is hidden behind glossy white doors, enhancing the illusion of space.

Shiny white-lacquer IKEA cupboards run the length of the corridor, including one that is set on its side above the recessed mirror over the breakfast bar.

Until Ian moved his office into the flat, one of these cupboards acted as his workspace.

Introducing warmth was also important in transforming what had been a dingy and cold dungeon-like space. Ian lay expensive underfloor heating everywhere. “We keep it on permanently,” reveals Claire. For the living area, Ian commissioned supremo fireplace architect Henry Harrison (the Platonic Fireplace Company man who invented pebbles as fuel) to design a feature “shelf fire”. It complements the simplicity of the shelf of green slate salvaged from a derelict building in Cardiff. White pebble-effect wallpaper is hung alongside it.

The flat is a place full of surprises. In Ian’s home- office, you find employees, papers, computers, showreels and plans.

But past the children’s quirky bedroom “pavement wall” – made of lights with blue glass lenses set into concrete – you see dinosaurs through ship’s portholes and a seascape mural.

The living area is cool and calm with white walls and white Panton chairs. But it is also where Ian meets clients for presentations, projecting his radical refurbishments via the plasma screen.

But this room has a further surprise: unscrew the table’s legs, lift off the table top and push the beautiful low-slung SCP orange sofas to the sides – and the area becomes the couple’s party venue.

IN THE clean, corridor kitchen you find blue and orange tiles, builder-built brown and turquoise units and classic Bombo bar stools. But one step further and you are in the couples “bordello” bedroom. “It’s a night space,” Ian explains. “It is the darkest room, so we decorated it highly.” Previously, it was white with white shag pile but last year the couple painted its ceiling fuchsia – and hung Florence Broadhurst 19th century revival wallpaper featuring galloping horses on reflecting silver paper. The room also has purple chiffon curtains and a Maisonette painting-by-numbers screen of flowers above a purple B&B Italia bedhead. “I dyed that. It’s the only thing I did in the flat,” admits Claire.

Much has been imaginatively achieved with more style than shekels. The Jacuzzi bath in the children’s bathroom was rescued off a friend’s rubbish heap; the mosaic tiles in the couple’s wet room came from bankrupt stock – and because they ran out of red ones, Ian finished the wall with a white mosaic cross.

In their bedroom, IKEA mirror cupboards were covered with sticky plastic film to look like sandblasted glass. “We had a limited budget and ran out of money,” explains Ian. Claire adds: “Now we hire the flat out for fashion shoots.”

Before the couple bought the apartment, they spent four years trying to acquire an enormous subterranean council garage in west London. They had obtained planning permission to build a lateral flat in it. “I still hanker after that space,” says Ian.

Claire replies, pointedly: “Maybe we will get it when we have sold this place.”

“Oh, are we on the market?” asks Ian, surprised.

The completed flat has recently been valued at a cool £750,000.

HOW TO GET THE LOOK
Ian Hogarth Hogarth Architects, 61 Courtfield Gardens SW5 0NQ (020 7565 8366; info@hogartharchitects .co.uk; www.hogarth architects.co.uk).
Intergrated Intelligence, for computer-controlled lighting and other house systems (07956 827586).
The Platonic Fireplace Company, for fireplaces (020 8891 5904;www.platonic fireplaces.co.uk).
Minimalist pioneer Henry Harrison sells modern fireplaces and undertakes one-off commissions (020 8891 5904)
Borderline wallpaper from Florence Broadhurst (020 7823 3567)
Maisonette – for similar paint-by-numbers pictures to the one featured in the Hogarth bedroom- (020 8964 8444; www.maisonette.uk.com)
To hire out your home for fashion shoots, contact Lavish Locations (020 8742 2992; www.lavishlocations.com)
Lasarcroft, for rubber floors (01482 229119)
For the SCP, Michael Sodeau orange sofa, call 020 7739 1869.

WHEN Lucho Brieva first set eyes on the disused office block, he knew he had to have it. He was looking for a place to house a metal workshop and the overflow of guests from the St John’s Wood home he shared with his then wife and mentor, singer Chrissie Hynde. He wanted somewhere to work, combining metal and glass to create pieces such as dining tables, candelabra and even showers.

In 1998, the three-storey Kilburn property was “a bargain” at £700,000. Set in a secluded courtyard, the 10,000sq ft Victorian building was originally constructed as stables and a railway depot. When he bought it, it was in a parlous state with smashed walls, broken floors and dangling neon lights. But it had the space, off-street parking and location he wanted. There were no planning objections to his proposed change of use, and so, a few weeks later, Colombian-born Lucho, 38, set to work with three labourers.

Brieva – who trained as an architect and worked as a boat interior designer before becoming a singer, philosopher and metal artist – decided to gut the property himself. He redid the wiring, plumbing and plasterwork, introduced soundproofing to make way for a state-of-the-art recording studio on the top floor, constructed partitions in the open-plan apartment, made a metal workshop and gallery on the ground floor and laid new floorboards and wooden floors. The project took two years and cost £180,000 (the building is now valued at £1.6 million). “It wasn’t stressful,” maintains Brieva, “because I wasn’t living on site.”

Then, in 2001, he split up from Hynde. “I decided to move into the apartment. We’d moved home every year for six years. Chrissie was always looking for the perfect house,” explains Brieva. “I got exhausted and hated maintaining huge properties. So now I like having a compact, manageable home.” The apartment is about 2,000sq ft. If he tires of “compact” living, he can go upstairs to the recording studio, where he is working on an album with Roxy Music guitarist Phil Manzanera, or downstairs to the gallery, which he uses for art shows, parties, lectures, dinners and as a library.

The apartment is a peaceful, airy, open-plan space with earthy and neutral colours and dark wooden Junckers floors throughout. The look is East meets quirky West.

There are cream sofas, 19th century French radiators, a piano and a wall of windows hung with wooden Luxaflex blinds to hide the railway. And Brieva’s imaginative creations – from a steel-frame dining table with a Venetian glass top lit underneath by tiny ruby bulbs to a kitchen splashback of glasslike polycarbonate illuminated alternately by pink, blue or yellow back-lighting. “Lighting is incredibly important,” explains Brieva. “At the flick of a switch, you can visually change the size of a room and create a space that is sensual, mystical or a workspace.”

He designed a kitchen at one end of the apartment, a sitting room at the other and constructed a low “wall” of painted cupboards to define the bedroom area. He then fashioned a Japanese-style screen from steel frames backed with polycarbonate to partition off the bathroom. There are no internal doors apart from this one. He decided on the layout by using his architectural experience and “intuition”. “I wanted the energy to circulate,” explains Brieva, a former martial arts champion. “I used proportions that are based on sacred geometry from ancient civilisations.”

Amazingly, Brieva made all the fixtures and furniture, except the sofas. His bathroom is like a solo art show. A font-style MC Stone basin of limestone sits on a square, red light-box, just waiting to be transferred to a modern cathedral. (“The circular basin placed on a square base symbolises the marriage of heaven and earth,” says Brieva.) He has encased a double-ended Bette bath in a front panel of milky Perspex, and lit the marble walls of his shower from behind the rock. “It looks beautiful and makes the stone warm.” Only the lavatory remains unreconstructed.

Turning his hand to kitchen-making, Brieva put sapele wood work surfaces and eye-catching copper doors on cheap units. He fitted a chessboard floor made of slate framed with cherry wood. He continued through the sitting room, fashioning iron dagger-shaped wall lights and personally constructing a painted MDF sideboard and chunky floating bookshelves. Outside he created a Piranesi-inspired wrought-iron balcony for his bedroom window.

Inside the bedroom – a monastic, calming place with rough cream plasterwork walls, Moroccan lanterns and Ganesh (god of business) beside the bed – Brieva made something surprising. He pulls forward a large Sufi oil painting of a sacred lotus and the birth canal to reveal a cupboard… containing 40 gleaming knives for his martial arts fights. “Lucho means ‘I fight’ in Spanish,” he laughs. He needed that warrior spirit to turn a lousy office into a beautiful work/play/live space.

GET THE LOOK
Lucho Brieva: open by appointment, the gallery shows Brieva’s work and he undertakes private commissions such as his dining table with its Renaissance pillar-style copper legs embedded with blue glass (£2,000), giant candelabra (£2,500) and iron and illuminated glass-framed shower (£3,500). Call 020 8960 2794.
MDF shelves and cupboards: John Murray, known for excellence in design and craftsmanship (07773 361568).
Lighting: at-the-touch-of-a-button dimming and pre-set lighting scene selection from one stylish wall control by Lutron Lighting Control, changing mood and visual space (0800 282107).
Cast-iron reclamation radiators: Brondesbury Architectural (020 7328 0820).
Wooden blinds: Luxaflex (0161 432 5303).
Bathroom: MC Stone for Bette double-ended Starlet bath and font limestone basins (020 7289 7102).

LAST week, Jane Keisner was up a ladder on a building site wearing a mink coat, hard hat and wellies. She and her business partner, Joanna Lindsay, are known to their clients as the Trinny and Susannah of the decorating world: bossy, vibrant, formidably energetic, fixers of all things domestic and blessed with a strong sense of style.

The duo can unpack a kitchen, find, mend, build or unbuild, design, project manage, make a bed or scrub a floor – they can even hire you a good nanny.

They are also peacemakers, often being called in by desperate clients on the point of murdering a builder or demanding a divorce over disputed curtain swatches. The pair bring harmony, but not by imposing their own sense of style: they work with a client’s own taste, whether that is for the chintzy or the minimal.

And they claim to save their clients money. Managing a project yourself can prove costly when you don’t know where to go for bargains and have to buy everything retail. The two Js, perhaps uniquely, pass on their trade discounts to their clients.

I called them in myself recently when my home makeover was about 85 per cent finished.

I had spent hours fondling Valli & Valli door furniture and marrying Majestic shower doors with Bette baths, and so many days deciding with whom I should sleep (Bart Halpern bedroom fabrics won me over) that I was in danger of paying council tax at the fabric store.

But I was also overloaded (is life really meaningless without a Gaggenau steam oven?), and could no longer see the designer wood for the (maple, oak or walnut?) trees. I lacked the confidence to finish the project myself and longed for help. The two Js came to my rescue.

The two women arrived at my north London home, Jane, 42, decorated expensively in Prada and Gucci, Joanna, 36, more high-street in Warehouse and Zara: two different approaches, both yielding terrific results.

They started working together in 1998. Before that, Jane was a currency dealer turned door-todoor speciality bread seller; Joanna cut her teeth building a gift business.

The two of them charge though my house passing sentence on each room: that desk would have to be moved; a plain blind would make this room look bigger; Andrew Martin’s mushroom fabric would look divine here; change that armchair; put battery-controlled Velux blinds in that room and a touch of taupe in the other. How about a Saniflo lavatory in this cupboard? Jane downed coffee on the move, Joanna scribbled notes.

And then they turn their attention to me. They had picked up on my taste the moment they walked through the door and were so spot on. I had already on order many of the items they suggested that I buy (except it took me months to track them down).

The pair also had suggestions to achieve the results I wanted in a more economical fashion.

Joanna takes out her phone and it looks as though they might be phoning each other, but Joanna is getting an estimate from the joiner.

Their enthusiasm for my home comes thick and fast. “Oooh, what beautiful carpets, lavender-tinged Wilton,” murmurs Jane, stroking my mousecoloured carpet appreciatively.

“Gorgeous,” concurs Joanna. “And those stunning recessed downlighters must be by Candela.”

Their own style is low-key and neutral, one of understated elegance. But they are adaptable. “We draw the line at cut-off curtains, or orange walls with purple spots,” says Jane, entering my daughter’s bedroom and encountering its blue-and-white spotted Cath Kidston carpet, raspberry walls and azure floral blinds.

Joanna and Jane both attend the initial client meeting. For the first consultation and ensuing estimates they charge £500. Thereafter, they charge a flat fee, calculated on their instinct for the job’s length and “Ikea has a table that would look fantastic in this kitchen,” says Joanna. “Otherwise our joiner could make you one with a walnut top and steel base. Or have you seen … ?” She makes a mobile call. cost. That usually works out at about 10 to 15 per cent of the project. Recently they charged £30,000 for changes to a suspended gym over an indoor pool in Belgravia, but just before that they were able to manage the complete makeover of a Muswell Hill flat for just £2,500.

“We hate to spend people’s money unnecessarily,” says Jane. “If we can find a fabric for £40 that looks the same as one for £150, we’ll always go for the cheaper option.”

For one job they were given carte blanche at a St John’s Wood Victorian villa – even down to commissioning fine art from Cork Street with individual pictures costing up to £50,000. Then there was the Leicester Square flat where they worked at 4.30am because delivery lorries were not allowed into the area after 5am.

The two sometimes have a less happy relationship with builders. One got so exasperated with them he walked off the site and went home, complaining that his wife nagged him less than Joanna did. “But I called him up and nagged him some more and he came back and finished the job,” she giggles.

As the pair leave my home, their promises to send me catalogues, swatches and people are soon being delivered – even before they get to the end of my road, their suppliers and contacts begin calling me to make appointments for quotes.

THEY rode 26 horses in the central London drawing-room of architect Seth Stein and his wife Dorothy, a film producer. That was when their home, a derelict builder’s yard when they bought it two years ago, was used for stables. Now the only evidence of the horses are the original 1880s numbered tiles in their dining-room, denoting where they hung the animals’ tack, and the paddock-sized rooms.

You enter through massive gliding James Bond-type electronic gates opening on to a cobbled yard. Then you go into their awesome house through a door surrounded by frosted glass. Nearly everything there, from every wall to each step of floor, is new – and mostly designed by Seth. Once inside you are immediately greeted by a concrete cylinder containing a cloakroom. Inside, a font-like marble basin floats out of the wall and tepid water, triggered by the light, pours from a steel tube. It’s so minimalist there isn’t any soap.

A 100ft corridor containing just one picture, and called The Gallery, leads to the drawing-room. Like most of the house, The Gallery has a heated concrete floor and ivory walls. Embedded in the floor are amethysts from a hippie shop in Soho. ‘It’s feng shui to purify the negative energy created by the drains,’ explains Seth, in architect’s uniform of black jacket and white polo neck. ‘But it also tells you where the drains are if you have to dig them up.’ On one side of The Gallery a skin of glass runs from floor to ceiling, flanking the courtyard which was formerly full of building materials. On its other side is the erstwhile workshop, now the kitchen. ‘Instead of net curtains, we’ve planted a wispy strip of bamboo to screen the view,’ says Seth.

The courtyard, paved with Spanish limestone, is Japanese-looking and has two huge Tuscan olive pots, eucalyptus tree, stone block bench and steps to a roof deck. This is where Caleb Joe, their one year-old son, plays. ‘I prefer the urban idea of playing on the roof of an apartment building among chimneys and slates to boring old hills and trees,’ says Seth. Into the drawing-room. Here we stand in natural light under a precisely engineered glazed canopy on a refined-steel truss which replaced the collapsed Victorian glass roof. The cantilevered stairs with American oak steps curve through the room, sculptural and fluid, wrapping round the edge of the wall.

On one wall is a Mark Francis oil of mushroom spores. On another is a fire designed by Seth with a Portland stone square opening and a grate of raised steel studs supporting ‘coals’, in the shapes of spheres, cubes and cones. At night there are dramatic floodlights from the ceiling and a French 1950s black metal Anglepoise light.

The room, like everything in their house, is simple. ‘It’s my antidote to sitting in traffic in the Marylebone Road.’ The furniture, too, is sparse: there’s only a tapering red square steel table designed by Seth, a yellow curvy Bonetti and Garouste sofa, and a green Jasper Morrison chair. They’re waiting for some hip Marc Newson chairs. ‘The idea is that the furniture is sculptural as well as functional. Marc’s chairs are probably not even very comfortable.’

Next door is the dining-room with its Jean Prouve reconditioned 1950s school chairs on early hi-tech frames, a table of old oak floorboards on a stainless steel base and a chandelier made of Christmas lights and crystal – both designed by Seth.

There is also a Christian Boltanski photograph of Memories. But where are their family memories? ‘There are clutter zones in the kitchen and study.’ Certainly the study is plush, nocturnal and cosy – despite having grey waxed plaster walls and warehouse decking shelves – and houses their photographs and books.

The kitchen is 45ft long. Seth might call this ‘the dumping ground’, but the space is pure and functional. There are two long counters, one with a screen to hide the toaster and Squeezy bottle. ‘We sat 60 people here for a friend’s celebration lunch which coincidentally christened the house,’ says Seth.

UPSTAIRS are the original Victorian stable bedrooms with sash windows, now updated with oatmeal sisal carpet and calico canvas blinds. One bedroom has original timber pine trusses. Instead of a bedside table, it has a low stone shelf. A ceremonial garment from Zaire decorates the bed and nearby is Eileen Grey’s Bibendum chair. The cupboards are behind flush panels of varying shapes and sizes ‘to reflect their contents’, punctuated by a deeply recessed modern fireplace.

The bathroom is entered through a dramatic 16ft-high gap without a door. ‘This is a semi-recreational space. Bathing is not necessarily something you have to do behind closed doors.’ There is a stone trough basin and bath which is very simple (you cannot see the plug or taps unless you’re lying in it), all surrounded by Tuscan limestone.

The lavatory is hidden behind a panel and the separate shower is a curved form finished simply in cement render.

He wanted his home to be elegant. On all counts he has succeeded.

How to get the look BARBARA CHANDLER LESS is more in a minimalist household. However, the less you have, the better it must be. Proportion, space, light and materials are of the essence. If possible, use an architect.

The Clients Advisory Service at the Royal Institute of British Architects (0171 580 5533) will listen to your needs (including budget restrictions), and recommend architects. A leaflet gives details. Seth Stein Architects is on 0171 376 0005.

Underfloor heating is back in fashion with problems of 20 years ago sorted out. Plastic (polybutylene) pipes carry hot water through a concrete screed, which can be left as is, or given a variety of finishes, even wood or carpet. Expert system designer/supplier is Kampmann (0181 783 0033), who assesses and supply kits of pipes, pump, mixing valve and controls. Floor temperature must not exceed 27C. They’ll recommend installers. The system is only suitable for newly-built properties, or major conversions if you are raising the floor’s surface.

Floor paint is a cheap and effective minimalist finish. The International range has 10 colours including Granite Grey, Jet Black and White. It costs around £7.30 a litre from DIY Superstores (including B&Q, Homebase); a litre covers around 10 sq m.

Wax walls have a sensuous smooth finish in various colours, including pinks and grey, which you can leave as is. Before waxing let the plaster dry out for around six weeks – it contains a lot of water. The colour will lighten. Then seal with a coat shellac sanding sealer. Apply wax with very fine wire wool – grade 0000. Buff up later to a sheen with a soft lint-free cloth.

The Black Bison range by Liberon (leaflet from 017973 67555) is made from carnauba, which dries hard, unlike soft beeswax. The 13 shades include a neutral bleach finish, into which you could mix earth pigments. London stockist is Foxell and James, 57 Farringdon Road, EC1 (0171 405 2487). Wax to cover around 10 sq m costs around £10, plus £7 for sealer. Pleated Roman blinds are made by Three Mice Blinds in unbleached cotton duck. You can order similar through Bellhouse and Co, 33 Kensington Park Road, W11 (0171 221 0187).

Taps are the classic Arne Jacobsen Vola range, designed in Denmark 30 years ago. Buy them in chrome or colours from Aston-Matthews, Essex Road, N1 (0171 226 7220). To see minimalist baths and basins visit C P Hart, Newnham Terrace, SE1 (0171 902 1000). They’ll send a free catalogue (normally £3) of baths by Jasper Morrison and basins by Philippe Starck.

Aram Designs of Covent Graden (0171 240 3933), famous for furniture classics, hold exclusive world rights on 25 designs by Eileen Gray (1879-1976). The Bibendum, upholstered in leather is £1873.

Fireplaces can be installed by Real Flame, 80 New King’s Road, SW6 (0171 731 5025), using a new system of stainless-steel powered flues, with electric fans on the roof. The spiky grate, nicknamed The Hedgehog, was made specially.

Flues, which can be exposed or hidden, can run vertically or horizontally to any outside wall with no need for a chimney.

FLIGHT Lieutenant John Nichol reckons he had a very good war. Yes, his battered face was paraded on Iraqi television at the beginning of the Gulf War after he and John Peters were shot down over the desert and tortured for three days. And he was used as a human shield, imprisoned in an interrogation centre for seven weeks, subjected to mock executions, bombings, burnings, whippings and beatings. And he suffers still from flashbacks and post-traumatic stress disorder. Then in March he is to be made redundant in the wake of defence cuts. But he says he wouldn’t change a thing.

He is, you see, still enjoying the spoils of war. It is because of the Gulf that this week sees him finishing his first novel, Point of Impact, which, he says, is ‘based on real-life events in the RAF, but not about flying’.

Written in his spare time and in the four months that military personnel receive at the end of their careers to learn to be civvies, the novel is one of three he’s been signed up for by Hodder and Stoughton. ‘The other two were sold without a synopsis,” he reveals, “I started to write as a result of the Gulf, after Tornado Down [an account of the Gulf ordeal, co-written with John Peters] became a bestseller.

‘I’m used to deadlines, being under pressure, being told what to do, left for a long time to do it and having the ultimate responsibility of, you know, possibly killing somebody,’ he continues. ‘But this is scary. I’ve never before signed a contract for money and works of fiction.’ The books are not the only spin-off of his war. On Sunday John appears in Eamonn Matthews’s excellent new blockbuster television series on the Gulf War. ‘It’s brilliant. It shows that there’s only one certainty in war – that people will die. There are no winners and losers.’

Since the Gulf, John has also met Baroness Thatcher, General Norman Schwarzkopf and the Princess of Wales. (‘Princess Diana presented me with a bloody awful Crimplene tie.’) He’s been in demand as a lecturer, after-dinner and motivational speaker for companies. (‘In the Air Force you compete with other air forces, nations, people in your own squadron and yourself.’) He’s been flown worldwide to stay in luxurious hotels by post-Gulf contacts. And he’s contributed to television and radio on a variety of subjects. Oh, and the film rights to Tornado Down were recently sold.

SITTING in the Royal York Hotel, John speaks in a Geordie accent at the speed of machine-gun fire. Wearing a green jacket and grey polo shirt, he’s handsome, beefy and 6ft tall. ‘I’ve worn a uniform for 15 years. Now I have to buy clothes,’ he laughs. ‘It’s simple things like that, and getting a doctor and learning how to do job interviews, that you have to come to terms with when you’re crossing into Civvy Street. In the military we’re used to ordering people ‘Do this for me’ and it will be done.’

John is convivial, extrovert and adventurous. He bears the scar from an Iraqi boot kick on his face and has a prominent bump on his forehead. The lastis the result of his first encounter with death. ‘I was fishing, aged 10, and fell down the cliff and landed on my head. I didn’t fall far, just 20 or 30ft.’

He was brought up in North Shields in a house on a council estate in which his parents still live. They didn’t have a telephone until he was 14 years old. But, the youngest of four children, he had a cosseted childhood. ‘I was the baby and consequently got more than the others. I went on two skiing holidays when I was 13 years old. My parents had never even been abroad until they came to meet me coming home from the Gulf. My mother never worked and was always at home.’

It was a Catholic family – his parents have gone to church daily since his father retired – and John was an altar boy for seven years. ‘I’m lapsed now but I still believe in God. In your darkest times in captivity you pray and make all sorts of promises that you’ll go back to church. Of course you don’t.’

He went to St Cuthbert’s grammar school and left, aged 16, with nine O-levels. It had never occurred to him to join the RAF: he’d never even played at pilots. He wanted to be an electronics technician. ‘By chance I read an RAF brochure to stop myself being bored on a bus journey. Three hours later I’d signed on the dotted line.’

He recalls his time in the Gulf. ‘Once when we were attacked by stealth bombers the ceiling came down and I said ‘Right, I’m going to die now’. It’s quite calming knowing there’s nothing you can do about it.’ Another time a guard put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

In his flashbacks he relives his loneliness and vulnerability. ‘Pain hurts but you get over it. But you can’t imagine the fear and isolation. You didn’t sleep much because of the bombing and people screaming all around you. Every night nearly all 30-odd of us had the same dream – that we were back at base drinking and our capture had been a dream.’

Five years on, John still views life from an altered perspective. ‘The Gulf taught me that something good will always come out of smething bad and that there’s always somebody worse off than you. The things I thought were important aren’t. I’ve become less argumentative but more impatient as a result of watching my life ebb before me 24 hours a day and having no control over it. I no longer worry about money and see no point in putting it in a bank. When you come back after an experience like that you live your life today as though you were going to die tomorrow. ‘

Since the Gulf, John has been deployed to Bosnia (‘When your aircraft alarm tells you a surface-to-air missile is locked on to you, it’s totally terrifying’), the Falklands, Cyprus and Canada. But now he’s taken voluntary redundancy. ‘With the cutbacks there were no more opportunities for me.’ He has a pay-off, before tax, of four times his annual £30,000 salary. ‘But I’m a real candidate for ending up on the streets. People a thousand times more capable than I have ended up in the doldrums. It’s the most frightening thing I’ve ever done.’

FIRST there was Penny Hughes, Coca-Cola’s 35-year-old UK president who, newly pregnant, decided that motherhood was the real thing and abandoned her position and £250,000 salary.

Now the glossy magazine editors – the prototype You Can Have It All And More women – are, in the gleeful eyes of Tabloid Man, succumbing to the pressures of running home and magazine, getting their priorities straight and chucking in the latter for the former or, at least, for lower-paid freedom.

On Saturday Amanda Evans, editor of Homes and Gardens, quit for her home and garden. The week before, Linda Kelsey, the original Cosmo woman turned editor of She (the magazine to reclaim motherhood and help women juggle their lives), left, suffering from stress and wanting to spend more time with her son. And remember the recent exodus of five other female editors from National Magazine, publisher of Harpers & Queen to Good Housekeeping? You could imagine the babes at Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue, Tatler and House and Gardens, cocking a snook and nappy at their National Magazine competitors. Instead, shivers have gone down their well-bred spines at the misogynist cries of ‘told you so’ and ‘you can’t run a company/magazine and raise a child’ in the Press.

Don’t you know, ask the Conde Nast girls, that Annie Holcroft, publishing director of Vanity Fair, brings her kids to the office? They watch Wombles videos while she negotiates million-dollar deals and sews name tags in their clothes. And that Vogue editor Alexandra Shulman has an eight-month-old baby, a 12-year-old live-in stepdaughter and husband and the most glamorous job in the universe?

ALEXANDRA, 37, has Mother Earth’s long hair and ample breasts, Mama Nature’s clean face, grey cashmere jumper and high snakeskin shoes. The walls of her voluminous turquoise and peppermint office display not photographs of Linda and Naomi, but of her son, Sam. She is clever, she is successful. And she’s paid, partly, to meet glamorous people, to party, wear heavenly clothes and receive bucketloads of flowers. ‘Some days I think ‘having it all’ means that I am so lucky. Other days I think it means, ‘why have I got all this dumped on me?” laughs Alexandra, who was up at 5am with Sam. Does she think she’s good at her job? She pauses. ‘Sometimes.’ But her job is stressful. ‘I have to be available for people to talk to constantly, which is draining. Responsibility is stressful, as is travelling two and a half months a year, and trying to pack everything in so as to have time with Sam.” Alexandra says her husband Paul (writer Paul Spike) is probably the one who gets it when she gets home.

‘I sympathise with what I’ve read about Linda Kelsey,’ she continues. ‘I’ve been severely anxious twice in my life. Suddenly everything becomes too much and you decide to take time out. I’ve now learnt breathing techniques and how to notice when things are seriously pretty difficult. But I get terrible pressure headaches. Lavender oil and Rescue Remedy are very good.’ She crosses her arms self-protectively.

She believes the idea that women work because they want to have it all is a fallacy. ‘You work because you’re paying bills. That’s what most married women with children here are doing.’ Alexandra employs a daily, gardener, nanny and laundry woman. ‘Practically my whole salary goes on paying for help and my share of the mortgage. The nanny has more money to throw around, by far, than myself.’

That salary, it should be said, is not your average London career girl’s. ‘It’s under six figures!’ she protests. Paul also pays for the upkeep of his two children by a previous marriage. Alexandra took four and a half months’ maternity leave. ‘I looked after Sam non-stop and spent most of the time breast-feeding. The rest of the time I spent solidly trying to find a nanny. I interviewed millions of people.’

What were her feelings about work while she was on leave? ‘Sometimes I thought I wouldn’t be able to deal with coming back. I thought I’d miss Sam and be unable to do the job. On leave you become quite unconfident. But the transition was easier than I thought and ultimately I don’t have any desire to be at home on my own with a baby day after day. I’d become bored, unconfident and depressed.’

She was raised by a working mother, the etiquette writer Drusilla Beyfus. ‘I was brought up by the person I’m now becoming, only she was better organised. So I know exactly what it’s like having a working mother. Until I was about seven my mother didn’t have much to do with me. She had a nanny at weekends and nights and lots of other staff. I suspect that as a baby my relationship with her was not as it should be.’

BEING a working mother is difficult. ‘We’ve got it wrong in many ways. It’s not really feasible for women to work incredibly hard, be good mothers, lovers, wives, housekeepers. The more we try to do, the worse it is for us. The whole question of men and women’s roles in the partnership is something that hasn’t caught up with such developments. There is no other area in your life so unclearly defined.’ Sometimes, ‘like everybody’, she feels desperate to quit work. ‘A lot of the time I’d like a peaceful life. Peace of mind is hard to come by when you’re rushing so much of the time. Probably all of us have looked at more flexible, alternative, freelance or whatever ways of working. But money plays a great role in that. I’ve never been career-orientated. But I’ve always been motivated by the desire to earn money.’

FORMER Londoner Adrienne Campbell, 34, eats food foraged from hedgerows, teaches her children at home, has just created a new local currency for her Sussex village, boycotts supermarkets, won’t vaccinate her children, changed her name from Katy when she felt she’d outgrown it, was celibate for two years, has spiritual revelations and gave birth underwater at home in front of her children and the au pair.

Hers is an unusual life, and very unusual for someone educated at Francis Holland, a smart private London school. She was raised by her international businessman father and nicely bred stepmother among their friends like David Niven, Sean Connery and multi-millionaire entrepreneurs. She also gained a scholarship to America’s leading science university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where, aged 19, she wrote a paper on cancer (with a professor from Harvard and another from MIT). Then she became a journalist on The Economist.

But first the currency. Adrienne, who lives near Wadhurst, has created a currency called Wads with 10 other community-minded souls. “One Wad equals a pound,” she says. “If I want to buy someone’s honey I’ll pay him a cheque in Wads, he banks that cheque at the wholefood shop and uses the credit to buy something locally. It’s a centralised bartering system whereby people exchange goods and services without having to do so directly with one another. If I have masses of herbs I can exchange them for baby-sitting or plumbing.”

The currency is useful for people short of cash and encourages villagers to develop skills and get to know one another. “Such systems are flourishing in England. More than 200 of them have started over the past five years.” She smiles and takes a sip of her peppermint tea.

SHE has also embarked upon another singular project. In January, Adrienne and two other families started a unique school in her sitting-room. It has eight children from the ages of five to eight whom she intends to educate until school-leaving age. The National Curriculum is followed loosely. But the emphasis is on freedom and nature (“The children can tell what animals have been through the hedges by the footprints and stool”) and fees are £600 a term. She hopes for a government grant and to offer an alternative to the state system. The idea came to her after her five-year-old daughter Sophie had spent a year at the village school.

“She didn’t like having to do maths when she wanted to read, or art when she felt like writing.” Adrienne was disillusioned by the state and private systems, the more so after studying the pioneering work of Satish Kumar, a visionary in Dorset. “Children educated privately are pushed academically too early on. Also I believe in respecting children’s choices.” Her school is a non profit-making, parent-run co-operative. “A parent who is a paid teacher teaches in the morning and the other parents teach for free in the afternoons.”

The latter don’t have formal qualifications. “The parent is the best qualified to teach the child. Studies show that home-educated children are two or three years ahead of school ones if they go back into the system.” She says her pupils are happy, uncompetitive, motivated and respectful. We’re sitting in the exquisite setting of her garden, next to wild flowers and her 25-year-old Citron. Here she lives with her three daughters (aged one to five) and composer husband, Dirk, in a 100-year-old oast house with round rooms. She has a beautiful equine face, speaks purposefully and slowly, and wears jeans and scraped-back hair. Her body is relaxed. Her first life-changing experience came on holiday in Turkey in 1982. “I had a spiritual revelation. I can’t explain it more.” On returning, she joined Subud, a cross-denominational religious movement. “Twice a week we do spiritual exercises. It’s like tapping into a divine life force.” She met Dirk through Subud. “We’d both been celibate because we kept making the wrong choices with the opposite sex.

“It was instant recognition. We got engaged after two weeks.” From there her lifestyle took more and more alternative turns. Take childbirth. “My mother had died in childbirth, having twins, so I thought through very carefully how I wanted to do it.”

Her first born, Sophie, was delivered underwater, without painkillers and with Dirk in the birthing pool. She didn’t have a choice with her next, Anna, who was born prematurely. She decided to have her third baby at home. TWO midwives and the children were present at the birth. “They sat cuddled up on the sofa next to Dirk and the au pair. I was screaming and grunting and Sophie was pretty disgusted with the blood.” Wasn’t that damaging and traumatic?

“Possibly. But I think it helped the girls bond with Rose and see that birth is a normal part of everyday life.” Wasn’t it voyeuristic? “Possibly. But I think the pros outweighed the cons.”

The family rarely visits a doctor. “I’ll only go for a diagnosis in order to find out whether the illness is infectious and what the long-term effect will be.’ She relies instead on herbal remedies, homeopathy, eating healthily and fasting once a year during Lent. “We eat a lot of salads made from weeds, wild flowers and hedgerow herbs.”

Adrienne decided not to vaccinate her children against anything. “I read extensively and felt the risks were greater than the benefits. The well-documented hazards of vaccine are brain damage, convulsions, a damaged immune system and death.” She looks at her feet.

Her attitude to personal hygiene is alternative as well. She didn’t wash her children’s hair for two years and now washes it only occasionally. “I have friends who spend six weeks letting the gunk out – you have to wear a hat because it’s so disgusting – and, after that, you have lovely shiny hair.”