Top London design: Association of Art & Antiques Dealers CEO reveals her favourite shops and trends to watch

Freya Simms is head of The Association of Art & Antiques Dealers — LAPADA — with her career in the art world spanning auction houses, commercial galleries and art fairs.

She is preparing for the 10th edition of the LAPADA Art and Antiques Fair, which will be in Berkeley Square, Mayfair from this Friday until September 18.

A number of preview invitations are available to Homes & Property readers by emailing fair@lapada.org

This year’s LAPADA fair has five large plane trees as part of the floorplan so I am watching the weather.

We are constantly on guard for floods through the roof. I’m looking forward to working with Sarabande, Lee Alexander McQueen’s foundation, which will, for the very first time, showcase the best of British art and design at the fair.

We’re also launching a mentoring programme, which actively encourages newer dealers into the industry.

I’ve lived in the top two floors of a converted Edwardian house in Shepherd’s Bush for the past 15 years.

It is open plan with windows on both sides, and reminds me a bit of loft living in New York. My nine-year-old son enjoys the half-spiral staircase going through the property.

I love the vibrancy and creativity of the area, from the Bush Theatre to the very best Syrian restaurant in London, Ayman Zaman.

Shepherd’s Bush has traditionally been popular with BBC executives with the TV studios nearby, and it’s also home to creatives such as Kate Pakenham, who produced this year’s theatre hit Emilia, through to Xavier Bray, director of The Wallace Collection, as well as musician Jarvis Cocker.

There’s a huge crop of fantastic independent shops in Askew Road in west London, from The Ginger Pig — London’s best butchers, in my opinion, where the meat arrives directly from Yorkshire, and they also provide a first-class Bolognese sauce — to Cocktail, which sells lovely second-hand ceramics, jewellery and baskets.

The shop is hard to miss — there’s a fibreglass sheep outside, covered in little tissue paper bows.

There’s also Max Inc for vintage and modern design, such as classic Eames chairs and high bar stools, alongside lighting from the Fifties and Sixties.

I’m a big fan of reclamation specialist Retrouvius and of the antiques dealer Ted Few, who’s usually only seen by appointment at his home, but he’s now also a regular at LAPADA.

I’ve bought some of my favourite watercolours of what I call “fat bottom girls”, as well as some grand tour drawings of Florence from him.

I’d love one of the Georgian townhouses backing on to Ladbroke Square Gardens. They have private gardens, such a secret oasis in the heart of London.

I would need a room decorated entirely in bespoke hand-painted silk wallpaper. I’d choose Braque’s Villefranche from Fromental.

I used to have all my holidays near Villefranche, near Nice in the South of France.

I am very lucky to have inherited some wonderful 18th-century Irish and Waterford crystal through my mother’s side of the family. Drinking from one of the glasses makes any sip feel like an occasion.

I also splurged on a painting by Stanley Dyson (1920-2007) when I was a new mother, and spent far more than I had at the time — but I smile every time I look at the painting on my wall.

My first purchase, when I was a teenager with my Saturday job in the leather department at Asprey, was a cheeky limited-edition print of Eve’s Apple by Daphne Sandham in a gallery which was in Barnes High Street.

In London it would have to be The Wallace Collection in Manchester Square, Marylebone; there’s five generations of collecting from the same family, all on view.

You can view everything from fabulous porcelain, to arms and armour and it’s a condition of the collection that nothing ever leaves the building, even on loan to another museum.

It was gifted to the nation by Sir Richard Wallace’s widow, and is free to enter.

I’m predicting that Century Mash-up will come into its own as the next generation embraces mixing it up across styles and periods, as people increasingly want more individual looks in their home.

I think people are moving away from beige and vanilla, and the cookie-cutter approach.

It has to be the Thames. It gives you the full breadth of London’s history from Greenwich to Hampton Court Palace with additions such as the Millennium Bridge and Tate Modern along the way.

You can’t be a born-and-bred Londoner without the Thames running through your veins.