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It is not until you go through the door that leads from the sunken bathroom on to a tiny roof-top extension that you realise Chambers's serious passion is textiles. It is here that she keeps a collection of fabrics that has been a lifetime in the making.

'I started collecting fabrics when I was really young, maybe 12 or 13. I was always cutting out, making bags or trousers and stuff for my room,' she recalls. She still buys any fabric that catches her eye, scouring Portobello Market religiously every Friday morning.

'I don't look for anything specific,' she says. 'I don't have things that go together, nothing matches and I'm quite catholic in my tastes. I like ethnic mixed with shabby English with a bit of Scandinavian and kitsch all together.' She sews now and again using her old Singer sewing machine, although it's more a case of altering things, and cutting up clothes and rearranging them.

The whole house in west London is crammed with layer upon layer of visual delights - things that have caught Chambers's eye over the years. Photographs and paintings lead your eye along the hallway and up the stairs - an abstract painting by her friend the textile designer Georgina von Etzdorf; a recently purchased iPad painting by Charlotte Faber, which she says is 'just beautiful and evocative of the brilliance of the English countryside on a rainy day', alongside photographs by Bruce Weber and other fashion photographers, and a portrait of her three sons taken by the eldest of them, the photographer Toby Knott, given to her as a birthday present.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk