THE EVENING STANDARD
HOMES & PROPERTY

July 2004

Mills & Boom
CASHMERE FOR LESS
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 clapper board, eco house. "But when I saw this, it was love at first sight," she says without irony. It is an idyllic 1800¹s former 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 on-line, mostly bespoke shopping business selling homeware with a very individual style.


She's also a woman who likes to do things differently. She works on a laptop 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, male au pair and his girlfriend Inge, as well as two Labradors and Harry Potter, the cat. "I like my privacy, but this works astonishingly well," says Amber.


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 ten days in which to move out of London and make this house habitable," she explains. "Oliver was tiny, at mouth- level to the exhaust fumes. It was time to go."


She hired four Polish labourers to live on-site. "My ex-husband, friends and I worked through each night after work. Ten of us stayed here, ripping it apart, blitzing and filling three 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 didn¹t 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% 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 left over from six different jobs" - to create an artistic wet room floor. She used plain fabrics for the curtains: James Brindley¹s 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!" Six months later she sold the London house 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; William Yeoward string console table; antique candle-only chandelier, contemporary three-metal sconces made by a blacksmith and two 19th century sunburst gilt mirrors with an antique carriage lantern in the middle.


"I never buy things 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 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; a19th century mahogany with pediment and for the au pair; brass in the guest bedroom 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 Teasmaid. 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 for birthday presents!"


Her eclectic style is emphasised in her bathroom with its freestanding, claw-footed Victorian bath and Conran white enamel cube cabinet. Only the guest room is traditional, with headboard of French flea market linen crowned with a carved wooden mantelpiece, antique knick-knacks 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 clients¹ houses and just move the furniture around, rehang the pictures - and completely transform their places."


She has totally transformed her property. She says smiling: "I love it here. It's the perfect house. Every morning I wake up and pinch myself."