As you mount the narrow stairs up to Maureen Doherty’s home, there is a distinct smoky smell. I am in the home of a style doyenne, so assume it’s one of those fashionable, charcoal-scented candles, burning expensively in a corner. But no. “Cigarettes,” she laughs. Like Doherty herself, it is unexpected: in this sanitised world, who smokes in their own living room? But then, who has an open-plan shower or puts guests up in the bathroom?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maureen Doherty. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian

Doherty’s fashion brand, Egg, is the opposite of mainstream. There is a cultish air around both her and her store, a whitewashed former dairy stables in west London. Her loose cotton clothes are inspired by functional workwear: Rajasthani milkmen’s overalls, monks’ trousers from Japan. “I take things that already exist and I twiddle them.” When Theresa May was photographed for American Vogue last year, by Annie Leibovitz, she chose a red Egg coat and cashmere jumper. Prime ministers aside, customers tend to be in the creative industries, including Tilda Swinton, Nigel Slater, Diane Keaton and Maggie Smith. The latter is a friend: Doherty dressed her in head-to-toe Oxfam for her role in Alan Bennett’s film, The Lady In the Van.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The boxed-in kitchen. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian

Egg’s outlier approach to fashion is mirrored in Doherty’s home and lifestyle. Until recently, she was an itinerant, staying in hotels or with friends, splitting her time between London, Scotland – a country she loves – and France, where her daughter and grandsons live. But when a small, two-storey building adjoining the Egg store became available, she snapped it up and enlisted architect Jonathan Tuckey, known for his interesting reworkings of old buildings, to turn it into a home. The ground floor was a leaking store room and upstairs, which hadn’t been touched since the 1950s, was half a dozen tiny rooms with a false ceiling.

Open-plan shower. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian

Doherty’s brief was enigmatic and poetic: “I told Jonathan I wanted a hut. It’s my dream to live in a hut near a river.” She sent photographs of huts, baths and gardens, a stone, wood from a Scottish beach, and a white ceramic bowl by her favourite potter, Lucie Rie, which formed the basis of the chalky colour scheme. At first, Tuckey says, “it wasn’t immediately obvious it was going to be somewhere you lived”.

He inserted a series of pale timber “containers” into the building to create a nest of minimalist small spaces, with skylights into the first floor roof and whitewashed walls. The exposed floorboards are stained black. It is a notably un-private space: a door-less shower room with exposed copper pipes overlooks a bathroom on the floor below, and can be opened to the elements via a skylight – “I love it when leaves fall in,” Doherty says. A mezzanine bedroom is open to the living space below, accessed via an open staircase. “I like the space to be one, particularly when I have my daughter and grandsons staying.” Home, she says, should be a social space: “I love a kitchen table, discussing everything over food.” On the ground floor is a neat bathroom, part whitewashed, part white-tiled, and barn doors large enough for a cow to pass through, that open on to the street. It has a bespoke square wooden bathtub, which is removable (it isn’t plumbed in; wall-mounted copper pipes provide water). The space triples as a meeting room and guest bedroom: the day I visit, Doherty’s niece has slept in there, on a mattress on the floor. Black-and-white photographs line the wall.

Up a set of narrow stairs, you enter a living area: an armchair, a reading lamp and a pouffe covered in dog hair sit around an open fireplace. Beyond is a vintage dining table, warped with age, alongside a bank of chalk-coloured chipboard cupboards that house a fridge, cooker/hob and storage. The walls are bare except for a large, colourful painting by Chinese-American artist Walasse Ting. Beyond is a small nook with a desk and a large walk-in closet, which is where Doherty’s young grandsons usually bed down when they come to stay.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The living area. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Guardian

Since the beginning of Egg, in the early 1990s, Doherty has supported ceramicists, giving them space to exhibit their pieces in her store. In 1998, she gave Edmund de Waal his first show: “Back then, his pots cost £80.” Last month, young makers Max Bainbridge and Abigail Booth, known as Forest + Found, staged a small exhibition.

Doherty’s little corner of London is a rarefied world, with the air of a village high street. It has a shop and a pub that bans mobile phones. In the 90s, it was “alive, full of creative people living on controlled rent”, but is now peopled by the super-rich. Doherty and Egg seem to bring colour, life and a little normality – or what passes for normality here – to the street. People come and go, her dogs mooch around and Egg staff iron clothes outside. “I’ve been here so long, I’m like the concierge. I hold everyone’s keys.”