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.”