TOMORROW Romaine Hart, the woman behind London’s most successful independent cinemas, goes to the palace to collect her OBE for services to the British film industry. For the past two decades she has enticed discerning cinemagoers to her picture houses all over London and the Home Counties, from the hip Screen on the Green, Islington, to the modish Screen on the Hill, Hampstead.

Romaine lives part-time in a Georgian house in north London with the through-traffi soon sniffed oc of distant relations, and decamps for much of the week to work in ‘London with fresh air’ her Fifties-style American home, a bungalow overlooking the Sussex Downs.

The Hart family boasts cinema owners dating back to the turn of the century. Romaine, the third generation to earn a living from the cinema, and her daughter Nicky, a film producer, take computers and fax machines to their metropolitan-style country retreat to do their London film deals overlooking fields.

The house was built in 1958 by a Scottish farmer who had a hut on the site, which is a protected area. In 1970 he rushed out to chase a cow, had a heart attack and never came home. Romaine bought the house even before the particulars were typed up.

‘They said it was a bungalow and I said ‘ugh’.’ She had been looking for a period cottage with dovecot and picture-postcard thatch. But the agent insisted she saw it. She made an offer on the spot. ‘The position was so fantastic.’ The Harts soon put the house through its urban-awareness training.

One visiting granny, then a gentle lady in her seventies, insisted on trying her first joint there; since the house is of open-ish plan, her grandchildren soon sniffied out her secret.

Another time John, her then husband, thought he heard burglars and rushed out with a loaded rifle. He fired his gun, barely missed his foot and caught the tail end of a cow. Nicky and her sister Sarah were taught to drive in the field, using the cows as roundabouts.

The neighbours have always considered it a house of nudity. It is a local joke that the Scouts who have an open invitation to use the pool are frequently greeted by people in birthday suits. The word spread, and aircraft from nearby Shoreham airport now fly low in summer. There have also been lots of wild parties in this outpost of liberal Hampstead. John held the reception there for his marriage to his second wife. As 150 people trooped through, Romaine sat greeting the guests of wife number two, then realised that most of them had been at her wedding too.

The house was pretty rough when they bought it. It had sheep in the sitting room and a naff Fifties wooden beam. The Harts took over and turned it into a Seventies pad with brown hessian everywhere. In the sitting room they had a Le Corbusier arc light and Le Corbusier chair with pony skin. It was like a trendy bachelor pad with groovy Oscar Woollens furniture. (When they divorced, John removed the LCs but left a Seventies brown corduroy chair.) They were determined to take London into the country. The hessian came down in the Eighties and they went minimalist in the Nineties, with a new kitchen, new bathroom and Swedish windows. The kitchen is designed by London architect Seth Stein. A modern room with clean lines, it has a beech plank floor, curved marble bar, Danish double cooker and large industrial sink.

‘I love his style and wanted to do something interesting and modern,’ says Romaine, a keen cook. On the wall is a frontal nude by their friend John Swarbroke: to turn on the lights, you press the nipples. The sitting room has white walls, sea-grass floor matting and massive creamy sofas. There’s an Adirondak, a beechwood Californian seaside chair which looks like a combination of UFO and flying deck chair. Like much of the art in the house, a friend made it in their garage.

On a side table is a book by Betty Balcombe, psychic healer, counsellor and close family friend. ‘She’s been a wonderful help and influence on my life and career,’ says Romaine, smiling. ‘When I first introduced Betty to Sarah, my daughter was living in a squat in Hackney with black walls. Betty changed her life and she came home and stopped rebelling.’ The bathroom is also a Stein affair with pebbledash ‘liquid stone’ on the floor, power shower, beech slat blinds and limestone surfaces that Romaine saw in a smart restaurant during the Santa Monica film market last year. They have two bedrooms, but have slept up to 12, utilising the sitting-room floor. They have further Stein plans for a minimal-style bedroom and a bathroom with glass all round, ‘so that you feel as if you’re in the garden’.

So back to films. Romaine is known to buck the film establishment, take risks and back outsiders. She sees 90 per cent of the films they screen and goes to all the film markets. How does she view the role she has played in the British film industry?

‘I started the Screens because I wanted the sort of cinemas that showed the kind of films I was interested in seeing,’ she says, curling her feet feet up on the sofa. ‘We try not to show films that aren’t of quality. We’re like a book club which vets the books first.’