NICHOLAS Logsdail, owner of the Lisson Gallery, is one of the art world’s most powerful figures. So it’s strange to discover that his first home was up a tree. “My parents had a big Arts & Crafts house in Buckinghamshire,” says Logsdail. When he was 14, he moved to the bottom of the garden.

“I’d built a treehouse. It had a first-floor bedroom, a room below, another bedroom and a balcony.” It was more like an apartment, really. “I lived there during the school holidays,” he smiles. “It had a paraffin stove, electricity and I hotwired it to install a telephone.”

Logsdail’s first home purchase was in 1967 in Bell Street, Marylebone. “I was a country boy. I came out of Marylebone Station, didn’t know London, turned into Bell Street….” Since then Logsdail, 59, has owned endless buildings in the street. He bought number 68 when he first married, number 54 in 1991, which he turned into his gallery, the Lisson, and 27, where he lives. Oh, and 31-37 where he lived with his second wife. “I don’t have a passion for property,” he claims. “I just love interesting buildings.”

He designed the first gallery, working with the builders. “I’m an amateur architect,” explains Logsdail, who represents artists Julian Opie, Douglas Gordon and Anish Kapoor. “We made it from two early-19th century tumbledown buildings I bought in 1966 and 1972.” The current Bell Street premises were a collaboration with Modernist architect Tony Fretton.

“We worked together on the design for two years.” The exterior of the new build has metal-clad panels and large glazed picture windows, while the interior gallery space was originally three back yards. “It has a feelgood factor, doesn’t it?”

In 1981, Logsdail found another derelict property – a 40,000sq ft brownstone block of 22 flats on New York’s Lower East Side.

Now the Notting Hill of New York, at the time the area was rough. “It had been a drug dealers’ squat and was boarded up.

The price was $1,000 an apartment – $22,000 in total. Lots of people were after it. I had to find the 10 per cent deposit within two hours.”

Logsdail acted instantly and acquired the building. Then the problems started.

“There was a $45,000 bill to pay, because the city taxes hadn’t been paid for 15 years. Things had to be done urgently to stop squatters moving in,” he says.

“Suddenly I owed $150,000 for upkeep plus $150,000 legal costs. I’d bitten off more than I could chew.” A year later he sold the building. “I recouped my costs and kept three large apartments.” Now he owns only one flat.

The experience did not discourage him from tackling another derelict building that needed his artistic touch – a 14th century farmhouse in a charming village in the Maltese island of Gozo. He bought it in 1984 for £8,000 and took 18 years to restore it. “I spent nearly two decades mixing cement and carrying around building blocks.” It now has a private courtyard, large mill room, kitchen, five double bedrooms and a tower with bedrooms offering island views. “It’s beautiful. I was sad to give it away when I divorced.”

In 2003, Logsdail visited friends in Kenya. “I thought I’d get some dreaded disease, be robbed and murdered.”

Instead he discovered Lamu – “an idyllic, safe island on the Indian Ocean” – and an 18th century, 6,000sq ft Swahili house with exquisite carvings and stacks of antique furniture. An elderly English couple were selling the house and contents.

“It has an exotic Arabian Nights feel and the original harem quarters,” he divulges.

“I took a no-money down lease for five years with an option to buy at a fixed price – on the condition that I restored the building. It wasn’t difficult to organise, just slow.”

To rent the Lamu house for £1,000 to £2,000 a week, email Nicholas@lisson.

co.uk. To rent the Gozo house, email Caroline Logsdail at stellamaris safeserve.com.

Artistic touches: Nicholas Logsdail (above) restored this 14th century farmhouse in Gozo, with its spacious mill room (below) and (above, right) terrace for entertaining, and hammock for relaxing (above, far left).

LUCY Judd appeared to have it all – a great husband, Dominic, a wonderful baby and an 18th century cottage home with roses round the door and sheep in the neighbouring field in exquisite Bodiam in East Sussex.

But Lucy, 31, was itching for something more. Most days she would jump in the car and drive 90 minutes just to be with friends. “There was no one likeminded nearby,” she recalls. “Most of them had never even been out of the area.”

There were no decent shops close by, either, and certainly no health club or amenities for mothers with young babies.

Lucy missed her past life as a property consultant for Ernst & Young, when she and Dominic had been one of Clapham’s Dinky couples – duel income, no kids yet.

All that changed overnight when their baby, Henrietta, came along in 2001.

They decided to move to the country, not realising it would mean a three-hour commute for Dominic, who recruits surveyors, nor how much their lifestyle would change. Says Lucy: “I morphed out of all recognition; I was miserable.”

A year ago, they moved again, but not back to London. They now live in another 18th century house – complete with Aga, beams and rambling outbuildings – also in East Sussex. But this time they chose a location near Fletching, close to busy Uckfield and easy for trains at Haywards Heath. Everything they need is now on their doorstep.

The move has prompted Lucy to turn her unhappy experience to good use. She has started a home-search company, Simply Sussex, which shows people how to avoid emotional and expensive mistakes when they move house – and to get it right first time. She charges a registration fee of £600 for a 26-week period, plus 1 per cent of the purchase price.

People’s first problem, she says, is a lack of time: “What should you do when you don’t have enough time to look, or when you are fed up with wasted journeys to see unsuitable properties, or when you don’t know the area terribly well and are frustrated by continually chasing agents?

Obviously, you should use a search company.” She is bouncing another new arrival, baby Freddie, on her knee.

Her questioning of clients goes beyond what type of house they want, to cover their transport, amenity, leisure, school and childcare needs.

“This is the crux,” says Lucy, who runs her company in between looking after the two children. “People make the mistake of concentrating on the ideal property – that chocolate-box cottage, say – instead of things like the commute, schooling and their children’s future needs.”

Some clients recently came to her with a specific property in mind.

“What they didn’t know was it had been on the market for a year and the price had been cut dramatically. They just thought it was great. It is only later that they discovered the plans for new houses opposite. But I already knew about them and could have saved them loads of time.

“In one case, I also knew about a busy road junction nearby that gets really noisy at rush hour. But whenever the clients came down it was evening and quiet. All they saw was a peaceful place.

“Also, in London, people often live in Victorian houses with big windows. In a cottage you may get low beams and a dark room, and in 17th and 18th century houses there is also a lot to go wrong.”

FOR her lifestyle, Lucy now has the perfect home. She has friends and a great primary school nearby, and a 10-minute drive to a good gym.

CLOSE your eyes and imagine you are on a long-haul flight; now open them. This contemporary steel, glass and timber house might be in Malibu or overlooking the harbour in Sydney, but actually, it is in south London. It belongs to Eric Lanlard, 36, a pastry chef from Brittany – supplier of gateaux to Fortnum & Mason and owner of Savoir Design, which produces extravagant celebration cakes – and his partner, Paul Newrick, who runs an aviation leasing company.

Their detached house, built by architect HM2 in 2001, sits away from the road, behind video-controlled gates: a modern cube approached by a Big Brother-style timber-decked path.

“A change from our last home,” admits Lanlard, in his strong French accent. “We lived for seven years in a tall, Victorian terrace house in Putney. We modernised it totally – but with old houses you always have to start again. When more cracks began appearing, we just got bored.”

Prior to that, the couple had experienced loft living in the penthouse of a converted match factory in Bow. They rather fancied living like that again.

“We decided to look for a plot on which to build,” says Lanlard, sitting on one of the simple Habitat dining chairs, which they covered in brightly coloured velvets. “The week after we put our home on the market, we saw this house in a magazine. We knew we wanted it, just from what we could see of the outside. We would probably have built something very similar to this anyway.”

The 2,097sq ft property cost £1 million a year ago. “We spent two nights unable to sleep, because we couldn’t afford it,” Lanlard admits. Then they discovered that the owner, a developer, was in a rush to move. So they persuaded him to let them pay a deposit, with another six months to complete. It was not until the week before they moved in that they finally managed to raise the money, thanks to the sale of their Putney home.

TO THE front and rear of the cube house are walls of full-height glass doors, which slide back completely, creating a continuous living space between the house and two garden areas. The steel frame of the building is exposed in an atrium, which has a glass roof. Upstairs there are huge windows everywhere, including internal ones – so ubiquitous are these, you have to remember to pull down a blind when you visit the bathroom.

The open-plan living/kitchen area is white, with more white – white on the wall, white kitchen units and even a white grand piano (this extravagant object can be programmed via a CD-rom to play all by itself). A feeling of space is created by the use of limestone tiles that are laid throughout the ground floor and then out to the garden areas. The space-boosting tricks don’t stop there: holes are punched through the steel in the treads of the glass-sided staircase, the glass coffee table and the windows in every direction all help to cast light around the double-height gallery area.

“The perfect place for summer entertaining, weather permitting,” says Lanlard, of the open-plan area running out to the gardens. “We can fit 100 people in here and the gardens, and our dining table, which normally seats 10, can be extended to 18.”

The house has exposed pipework for air-conditioning, underfloor heating, elaborate lighting and a sound system from Bose that provides wraparound music everywhere from tiny speakers. It’s all very hi-tech, but it still feels cosy.

“We wanted it to be warm. It took ages to find contemporary furniture that was comfy, stuff you could sink into without hurting your back,” says Lanlard. Two swivel leather armchairs and a matching plum leather sofa with a curved back did the business, but cost £15,000. “The sofa seats eight people happily, though,” he reveals.

The developer’s style is seen in the bathrooms, with their taupe anthracite tiles, sleek frameless glass shower enclosures, double-ended Bette baths, modern fittings and large cabinets to hide the clutter.

Similar taste is exhibited in the guest suite, which has a contemporary white B&B Italia bed in the middle of the room, floating shelves and jute curtains – “Yes, they’re sackcloth,” laughs Lanlard.

Did they do any work on the house? “We just knocked down a wall between two bedrooms to make a large master bedroom and extended a few walls for our furniture.” One wall was lengthened to fit their big, glass-fronted cabinet. Constructed of nine glass-and-steel boxes, it has remote-controlled lights that change colour inside and help to set the mood on the outside. “It’s our most expensive piece,” sighs Lanlard. “About £20,000.”

Upstairs they laid a violet carpet in the master bedroom and painted the walls mauve. A faux leopard-bedspread adds to the drama. The walk-in dressing rooms are piled with Louis Vuitton luggage.

“I’m the freak who collects Louis Vuitton,” laughs Lanlard, who has lived in Britain for 15 years. Outside, on the gallery, he has hung a horizontal painting vertically. The artist painted one of the panels using a baguette instead of a brush.

Ah, the French influence …

‘Our £20,000 light show’

The dining table may seat 18 and the grand piano play all by itself, but the most astonishing object in the house is the £20,000 wall of illuminated storage cabinets – made up of nine glass boxes. Eric Lanlard (above) says the unit is the pair’s most expensive purchase, but its remote-controlled coloured lighting (below) can be set to suit any mood …

WHERE TO GET THE LOOK

Limestone floor tiles from Stone Age (020 7384 9090; www.estone.co.uk)
Kitchen and bathroom from Alternative Plans (020 7228 6460; www.alternative-plans.co.uk)
Lutron for the lighting system (0800 282107; www.lutron.com)
Candela for recessed lighting (020 7720 4480; www.candela.ltd.uk)
Habitat for dining chairs (0845 601 0740; www.habitat.net)
Velvet for dining chairs from Today Interiors (01476 574401; www.today-interiors.co.uk)
Dining table is from The Collection (01962 771773; www.the collection.uk.com)
Sound system from Bose (0800 085 9021)
Self-playing piano from Markson Pianos (0800 074 8980)

WHEN Juan Corbella first saw the Clerkenwell space in 1998, it was a shell. The 1900s building had latterly been a print works. There was ink on the floor and Page 3 girls on the walls. Corbella, who moved to England in 1994, was smitten.

Standing amid the dirt, he envisaged a massive open-plan living space and two bedrooms. The 41-year-old City trader knew he wanted to do the work himself. “I need to be creative,” says the Mexican, who was raised in Spain.

The vendor, a developer, planned to turn the 2,600sq ft space into two luxury apartments.

“For the shell, I had to pay the price intended for the finished property,” explains Corbella, with equanimity. He forked out £600,000 and spent a further £300,000 on everything from renovations to the stereo. A stereo which, incidentally, is a state-of-the-art Lynn affair with Dalek-sized speakers.

The transformation from rubble to sophisticated bachelor pad was not easy. He hired architects Andrew Hanson and Richard Webb, who worked closely to his specifications. And Corbella, who lived nearby, went onsite most days.

First, they had to move a staircase that separated the two spaces. Then the builders went bankrupt and downed tools. “I was meant to move in in June 1999,” says Corbella. “Instead, it took until February 2000.”

The finished result was worth the wait.

Two curved, frosted-glass structures provide the hall walls and screen the living area from view. They are actually shower enclosures.

Do arriving visitors see the occupants bathing? “Of course,” laughs Corbella.

A 2,000sq ft sitting room leads off the hall, flanked on one side by a wall of windows, on another by a bank of 14 white cupboards and on the remaining sides by sliding, glass partitions, used to hide the kitchen and create a corridor.

The overall feeling is sensual: there are pillars, curved walls, curved furniture, curved false ceilings to hide pipes, even curved edges to the steps leading to floors on slightly different levels. The floor is oak and the walls are white, alongside splashes of Mexican primal colours. And it is all lit by seductive, atmospheric lighting created by a Lutron system.

The windows define the sitting, dining and television areas. Recently, they were fitted with 3M Night Vision, a film that reduces UV rays, heat and glare. “Until then, it was boiling in here,” explains Corbella. “And the furniture was getting ruined.”

A brass Mexican monkey is suspended from the sitting-room ceiling. This area also boasts electric-blue sofas and orange chairs by Moroso, a bright yellow wall, exposed brickwork and a blue Lucy Wassell rug with geometrical shapes that Corbella helped to design. There is also a bulky, Islamic-style, hexagonal coffee table created by David Linley, again to Corbella’s specifications.

“Look …” he says, and suddenly disassembles it to create six occasional tables.

Nearby is the television “room”, with a red leather aquiline couch and a large flatscreen television, which (a Corbella invention, this) swivels on an aluminium pole.

A cupboard with curved edges (Corbella-designed, natch) conceals floor-to-ceiling opera CDs … and we’re talking a high ceiling here. “I’m passionate about opera,” reveals Corbella, needlessly. The “study corner” houses a bespoke Linley bureau (which cost £16,000 in 1995), with its terrace of architectural model veneer houses and tower hiding his stationery. “Linley was sceptical of my idea that this asymmetrical design would work.” But work it does.

AT THE other end of the apartment is the dining area, with a B&B Italia glass table and silver leather chairs from Catalan Italia.

A metal-and-glass display table – again designed by You Know Who – contains a large decorative egg collection.

“I didn’t buy one egg. They’re mostly gifts from my parents. Once you have 10 eggs, everyone assumes you collect them.”

This area leads onto the compact kitchen.

Eye-arresting, pillar-box-red lacquer units are opened via sculptural geometrical cutouts (from boomerang to bone shapes.) “I didn’t want handles,” he explains. There is a breakfast island and black granite work surfaces. “I took cordon bleu and Le Manoir cookery courses. I like doing dinner parties.”

The master bedroom has exposed-brick and light-blue and yellow walls, one with wooden columns on it. And a four-poster frame around a £10,000 Auping bed. “The frame was made by Nicky Stephens. When he ran out of English walnut, he had to wait for another English tree to fall down.” It took seven months to finish.

Pull back the glass panels and the bathroom (Philippe Starck bath, blue mosaic-glass shower) becomes part of the bedroom. Next door is a guest bedroom and bathroom.

It is all extremely comfortable and everything is made with great precision – no expense spared. It is also a City whizz kid’s remote-control heaven, where almost everything operates by touch.

This man of many talents is now looking for a new loft. He wants better views and outside space. “But mostly I want to do up something again,” says Corbella, restlessly.

“It was fun.”

With that, he presses a control on his bed, and the mattress starts moving into different positions.

HOW TO GET THE LOOK

Architects

Web Architects Ltd: Richard Web and Andrew Hanson (020 7328 0310)

Furniture and fittings

David Linley Furniture Ltd (020 7730 7300, www.davidlinley.com)

Sofas and chairs by Moroso, dining table by B&B Italia, dining chairs by Catalan Italia available at Atrium (020 7379 7288, www.atrium.ltd.co.uk)

Bed by Royal Auping (020 7935 3774, www.auping.co.uk). Frame by Nicky Stephens, carpenter, at Raleigh Workshop (020 7733 8110)

Rug by Lucy Wassell at WaWa (020 7729 6768, www.wawa.co.uk)

3M Night Vision film for heat and UV ray reduction by Durable (0870 240 2480, www.durable.co.uk)

Motorised blinds with remote control by Luxaflex (0800 652 7799, www.luxaflex.com)

Lutron lighting system (0800 282 107, www.lutron.com)

Radiators by Bisque (020 7328 2225, www.bisque.co.uk)

THERE are not many people who own a former synagogue.

But that is what artist Maya Brisley has in her back garden. Built by refugees from the Warsaw ghetto, it is the smallest synagogue in Britain. Access has always been through Brisley’s east London home. “When I moved in, the synagogue was falling down, and everything had to be done to it,” she explains. Now it houses Brisley’s studio and has a spectacular glass floor – which doubles as a glass ceiling for the ground floor.

She also throws parties in it.

The house is Georgian, built by Huguenots. “It was a weaver’s home, so it’s not ornate,” explains Brisley, who who owns Canal, a shop that sells antiques, textiles and jewellery bought during her world travels. The floors (mostly original pine) still slope from having supported the looms; the dining room used to be the material shop. And most of the property’s original panelling, fireplaces and shutters remain.

The house is a typical town house: tall, with lots of rooms, opened up only where the hallway and drawing room dividing walls had fallen down. “There were such constraints when I did it up,” says Brisley, who is wearing a long Indian robe. “It’s Grade II* listed, and I wasn’t allowed to touch anything – although there’s not much you can do with a panelled kitchen.” Untouchable panels do not permit much bedroom cupboard space, either.

She paid £250,000 for the 5,000sq ft property when she bought it in 1994, from a lady who was a friend of an Admiral. “It looked like a ship,” laughs Brisley. “It was painted navy and white, and decorated with nautical maps.”

She pared the house back to its original form. “It was tumbling down. I had to reinstate things [the restorations are sympathetic] and do everything, from the wiring onwards.” Brisley did not begin work until she had lived there for two years. “That way I didn’t make mistakes,” she says. “If you do things too quickly, it’s expensive, because you have to redo them.”

She did not start decorating the property for five years.

The paintwork in the house is very distinctive. From the ochre walls in the dining room and hall and the black banisters and shutters, to a Cork green kitchen; a traditional 18th century kitchen colour. “It stopped insects. Originally it had arsenic in it,” says Brisley. “Lick the paint and you die.”

The sitting room is mahogany, the bedroom fleshy.

“Rather pompously, I call them Titian colours,” she says. “I mixed the colours using artists’ acrylics.

It lasts much longer. It’s like painting a canvas, which lasts hundreds of years.” And it is true that the paintwork looks fresh, even after several years.

When Brisley arrived in England, she had no possessions. Her father was an Armenian Jew, but she was raised in Istanbul by a nomadic mother who had travelled across Asia, living in a tent. Now she is an obsessive collector. Every available surface is covered.

Bread shelves display multidenominational religious icons in the drawing room. There is also a large French fruitwood table spread with a superb collection of antique Himalayan and African tribal masks, a white lacquer Charles Eames oval coffee table, an Edwardian ship’s day bed, a circular Coptic table fashioned from one piece of wood, and Asian textiles and cushions are everywhere.

The dining room sports a chandelier (“chucked out by a neighbour”), a green-painted French farmer’s table, a Welsh lambing stool and an Irish fool’s chair. “I’m not a great entertainer,” says Brisley. “I take friends to St John restaurant.”

In the hallway are Greek Orthodox tamata – images punched in tin seeking divine cures and protection.

In the bathroom, a Chinese lacquer table and antique Indian juggernaut ( chariot) wheel have been modified to serve as bathroom cabinets-The window blind is an Asian shawl. Every object has a story – this one came from American trading ships, that one from a Punjabi tribesperson, while the other was Brisley’s grandmother’s marriage rug.

OUTSIDE, the original Victorian street lights glow dimly. Inside, the lights are low.

Brisley lives with two Bengal cats. Until recently she also shared her home with ghosts.

“I used to hear buckets being moved and floors being scrubbed upstairs,” says Brisley, who is also a Tarot reader and comes from a tradition of mystics. Once, I saw two women wearing 18th century clothes. But they’ve gone now.”

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).