Nicky Haslam's top design tips: the interior designer and socialite shares how to create a personality-filled home on a budget

Nicky Haslam, interior designer, socialite, artist and cabaret singer, founded his architectural and design firm in the late Eighties.

The roll call of his clients includes Mick Jagger, Bryan Ferry, Rod Stewart, Ringo Starr, Charles Saatchi and Rupert Everett.

I moved into a ground-floor apartment on Cromwell Road, Earl’s Court seven years ago. The area is a bit of an insider secret.

These apartments were all built for ambassadors from the embassies and now they’re being done up, and painted white with new windows.

It’s becoming quite fashionable so I’m in the vanguard. Behind here there are wonderful garden squares like Earl’s Court Gardens.

I took down a wall and now have a huge living/entertaining area.

There are two bathrooms, a kitchen and a bedroom. The living area is panelled and painted grey (ie broken white with a bit of black and burnt sienna or blanc cassé as the French call it).

It was done by Karen Morris at The Finished Effect. She’s a genius at mocking things up.

I wanted it to look slightly ephemeral and light-hearted with trompe l’oeil effects. The marble behind the fireplace is faux, and the porcelain falcons on plinths are a couple of plastic bird scarers sprayed white.

I have a Giacometti-inspired lantern (made from bandaged plumbing pipes) and two great Swedish stoves on plinths (one hides pipes and electric cables, the other houses a drinks cabinet).

Over the fireplace is an architectural print in a Jean Cocteau-like gilded frame.

I love anything made of white plaster and I collect pomegranates. I wanted the room to resemble a stage set because it’s easier to make it look wonderful quickly.

In the deep-blue library/dining room I have an octagonal dining table that seats 12 — “no side plates” is my secret. The French always put their bread on the table.

Handmade paint from Paint the Town Green in Wandsworth. They’re all organic, I’m sure you can lick them.

My friend James Jackson on Lillie Road for browsing antiques. I love those square-based glasses from William Yeoward and I buy those thick glasses you put candles in cheaply from candle shops.

My friend Christopher Butterworth in Pimlico Road has the best lamps and lighting if you want to buy something off the shelf — 18th, 19th, 20th century.

Otherwise you get surprisingly good lights at Dunelm. I found a really pretty light the other day that looked like a ball of string for £14.

Turnell & Gigon in Chelsea Harbour have the best collection of linens and old chintzes anywhere. They also stock my Random Harvest fabrics.

I have sofa cushions by Rifat Ozbek made from old kilims. But I think cushions on beds look so awful.

Gayle Warwick does the most wonderful hand-embroidered bed linen in the world.

But I’d also recommend Wilko — two brushed cotton pillowcases for £4! And they’re perfectly lovely once they’re washed.

I get custom-made braids, tassels and fringes made up by Smith & Brighty Passementerie.

Or I go to Ealing and buy Indian trimming, which is ravishing. They do a gold loop that is wonderful.

The bay window in my apartment is curtained with a silvery voile which looks nice at night, made by my upholsterer Marcello (email landmupholstery@gmail.com).

I love four or five designs that I use in various places, and they’re all from George Spencer Designs. I can’t say they’re actually hand-blocked by a little man with a tub in Wales, but they’re sort of hand-blocked.

I like ones that are smudgy and not too well done, almost like potato prints.

In the hall of my apartment I have faux-bamboo wallpaper, available through my company NH Design as a contrast to the painted trompe l’oeil floor.

I go to a man called Savino Del Prete in West Norwood who does all my regilding. He’s the most brilliant craftsman and an extraordinarily knowledgeable person. He restores for most of the auction houses.

Otherwise I buy a tube of Goldfinger metallic paste, £11.20, from hardware stores. You rub it on and it looks quite amazing.

Savino again, otherwise I like bodging it myself with Gorilla Glue, around £5.

Abbott and Holder on Museum Street opposite the British Museum does small watercolours and drawings in the mood I like — light-hearted, not heavy stuff.

If I could afford it, I’d buy Cy Twombly’s at Gagosian. He was a great friend.

Also my niece Carina Haslam has a wonderful art gallery in Great Missenden and I buy a lot from her. She’s a very clever dealer and shows at all those Affordable Art Fairs.

Oka does wonderful fake flowers. I have the Faux Magnolia Stems, £18 each. Marie Antoinette had flowers made of porcelain, after all.

And I buy fresh flowers from the Co-op. I much prefer it to Sainsbury’s, it’s not so cold. You have to go round Sainsbury’s in a fur coat.

I’m having an exhibition of my watercolour drawings at Tristan Hoare’s gallery in Fitzroy Square in December and I just like them in plain grey frames.

I was going past The Marine Society in Waterloo and I noticed an alleyway to a tiny park called The Archbishop’s Park and it looked so ravishing.

And Duck Island in St James’s Park is rather wonderful.

The young rave about Shoreditch but Chelsea is never going to run out of interesting places and people.

I also love new Bermondsey around the Zandra Rhodes Fashion and Textile Museum and Jay Jopling’s White Cube.

And the Zoological Society of London in Regent’s Park has a wonderful museum with prints of animal bones and 18th-century cross-sections of ammonites.

I don’t want anything big. There’s a little house, 22 Bury Walk in Chelsea, that a friend of mine owned when I was young.

It’s an-all white castellated cottage with Gothic windows in the street next to the Theo Fennell shop.

It’s just one room up, one room down, but to me it’s the most romantic building in London.

LH: Nicky, you’re auctioning the contents of your country retreat — a 17th-century hunting lodge in Winchfield, Hampshire, leased from the National Trust. What should we buy?

NH: The house was so small, there are very liveable-with pieces, nothing overpowering.

There’s a wonderful tall plinth (£600-£1,000) with an urn on it that I bought from Colefax & Fowler years ago; a Gothic Revival cabinet on a stand (£1,200-£1,800) — and a very pretty pair of chintz-covered sofas (£1,000-£1,500) that I designed for Oka.