Interiors: A strong palette

Miranda Rhys Williams is as flamboyant as her grandmother, Elinor Glyn, the novelist who coined the phrase `It girl'. Emma Marshall finds a home with a personality as forceful as its owner's

"GOOD THINGS come to those who wait" has to be one of the most annoying proverbs. But in the case of Miranda Rhys Williams and her beautiful west London home, it has proved annoyingly true.

Having searched for her ideal flat for two years (she was insistent about having "loads of light, ample space and one dramatic party room"), Miranda finally settled on the 80th property she saw: an elegant apartment with soaring ceilings and polished parquet floors. Even then, there were so many complications with the lease that her lawyer advised her to withdraw from the sale. It took a further six months before circumstances were more propitious and she was able to secure the property. "I would far rather wait than settle for mediocrity," she declares, "and I know instantly and instinctively whether or not I like something."

She has applied the same rules to the interior decoration, so it is no wonder that it has taken five years to get it just right. She spent three years, for example, searching for a mirror to go above the mantelpiece in the living-room. The one there now "was the only ornate design that was not embellished with prissy bows and little flowers". And the extraordinary gilded oak dining table ("the table of my dreams") was commissioned from designer Orianna Fielding Banks. It is irregular in shape (so that an absent guest will go un-noticed) and large enough to seat 18 (essential for the huge dinner parties that Miranda loves to host).

The flat itself is in the sort of smart but nondescript street of red- brick Victorian terraces that strangers would describe as dull, but which those au fait with postal code prestige would term "highly desirable". Miranda says she likes the area because it reminds her of Brussels, a city where she used to work in development aid and emerging market finance for the European Commission.

The unremarkable architecture belies the opulence of the interior, which feels more like a 19th-century boudoir than a flat belonging to a young Nineties professional. Brilliant jewel-like colours - emeralds, purples and cherry reds - saturate the walls, and gold glitters on the ceilings. Her late father, the politician Brandon Rhys Williams, seems to have shared her taste for brilliant colours. An avid adherent to Goethe's Theory of Colour, he always insisted on bright orange carpets downstairs ("although he didn't always get his way"). "My childhood home was a Sixties, swirly heaven," she smiles.

Her father indirectly influenced almost every room in the flat. He encouraged his youngest daughter to share his delight in the sky's kaleidoscopic colours and the kitchen (definitely not for the faint-hearted) is an attempt at reproducing a particular dawn sky in all its orange and pink glory. "My father was incredibly energetic and inexhaustibly knowledgeable," Miranda says, remembering a childhood trip to Italy. "He would take us on tours of every church and hamlet, no matter how small, pointing out paintings and frescoes or his favourite madonna". Her decision to paint the upstairs ceiling gold, and paint those rooms blue and pink, was inspired directly by Fra Angelico's angels.

Other relations have played their part in fashioning Miranda's tastes. Her grandmother, with whom Miranda feels great affinity, was Elinor Glyn, the flamboyant novelist who coined the phrase "It girl" and scandalised Edwardian society with her best-seller Three Weeks, in which a mystical beauty seduces a young English aristocrat on a tiger skin. The book led to the popular refrain, "How would you like to sin/With Elinor Glyn on a tiger skin" and today the said tiger skin, a gift to Elinor from Lord Curzon, sprawls upstairs on the floor of Miranda's study.

Her maternal grandmother, Muriel Foster, was an equally unconventional figure and a renowned mezzo soprano at the turn of the century. It was she whom Elgar favoured for the role of the angel in his Dream of Gerontius.

Such brazen decor could have been orchestrated only by someone consumed by an aesthetic vision, as Miranda clearly is. "I am really a frustrated artist," she says, "and I spent three years having ideas but not having the time to carry them out properly. I was very specific about the colours I wanted, but as none of them came from paint pots and I was working in Kazakhstan at the time, I found it very difficult to describe the exact colours to the painters." Eventually Miranda decided that she would return home and devote her energies to the flat full-time.

In her new role as art director, she enlisted the help of two friends, a photographer and a poet, to paint the walls. In a process which could scarcely be described as DIY, every wall was stripped of lining paper to reveal the naked plaster beneath, and then impregnated with pure artist's pigment, sometimes applied in viscous layers straight from the tube and at other times washed to a pale veil with turpentine or linseed oil to achieve precisely the desired effect. Her choice of handymen was predictably disastrous. Walls were painted and then re-painted: "I wanted the study to be the colour of dark blue plums, but after about three attempts it was getting so complicated that I decided to keep the ultramarine," she sighs. "I decided on a knee-high fringe of magenta oil paint to widen the look of the room."

So much colour can be oppressive, but at its best the effect is totally seductive. This is particularly true of the "summer pudding" bedroom, where great blushes of paint bleed from peach to ruby red. "As a family we seem rather obsessed with dark pink," Miranda says. "My sister even painted the outside of her house with it."

If such a romantic family history goes some way to explaining the other- worldly quality of both the flat and Miranda herself, there is much else in the flat that is utterly contemporary. Modern French table lights fabricated from chicken wire sit alongside 18th-century Italian mirrors, and the materials used range from Islamic textiles to Indian organza and contemporary cloths. The elaborate interior is saved from looking fussy by the use of clean and simple lines and by Miranda's attention to detail.

The details for which Miranda is renowned are the door handles, which she went to Brussels to buy. "I always remembered what interesting door handles they had from the time I lived there, so it seemed logical to look for them there. I realise now that it was a rather Ab Fab thing to do, but friends agree it was worth it when they see them. People still greet me with `Aren't you the one who went to Brussels to buy door handles?' I don't dare tell them that I had them all nickel-plated when I got back to London so that they would match the light fittings."

The curved landing shelf epitomises the unifying simplicity of line. Designed by Ron Smith (the architect employed to oversee the structural alterations), this curve of creamy white doubles as a bannister and display case. It exhibits pieces by well-known ceramicists, including Edmund de Wahl, John Spearman, Hilary Roberts, Chris Keenan and Rupert Spira, all bought before their prices rocketed. "It is very annoying when everything I like suddenly becomes terribly fashionable and is feted by the major stores," Miranda moans.

At least she needn't worry about people copying her paint effects - until someone works out how to create them without months of toil.