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Neisha Crosland was in the first year of a graphic design course at Camberwell College of Arts when she attended a talk at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Wandering into the museum’s textiles galleries, she came face to face with Oriental fabrics and realised what she really wanted to study.

She headed straight to south-east London, buttonholed the dean, and changed not just her college course but the course of her life. Now, 30 years on, her textiles are inspired by everything from Elizabethan wallhangings to 20th-century paintings, such as the work of French Fauvist Raoul Dufy.

Her work, with its recognisable sense of space, form, line and colour, graces grand London hotels such as Claridge’s and The Berkeley, as well as countless homes. These days, along with gorgeous hand-embroidered fabrics, she designs wallpapers, tiles and porcelain.

Japan loves her — she’s doing a range of shoes there. She hand-paints her immaculate designs in studios attached to her home, and has just published her first book, Neisha Crosland: Life of a Pattern.

Homework: Neisha Crosland in her sitting room. Her own paintings and textiles figure strongly throughout (Charles Hosea)

Her family home, shared with husband Stephane and their sons, Oscar, 20, and Samuel, 17, is a labour of love that has taken 22 years in concentrated bursts. There isn’t an unconsidered corner, from handles on the steel doors and windows she designed, to mercury-mirrored double doors into her bathroom, to tassels attached to door keys, to colour: here a Mandarin yellow silk-covered chair, there a wall like warm, melting chocolate.

Today the buttermilk, vine-trained buildings grouped around a walled courtyard garden are redolent of the South of France in the Thirties, with large buxus balls, tall topiaried Ilex and mature olive trees set off by wrought-iron chairs and a bespoke concrete-topped table.

The French influence is no surprise, since one source of inspiration is the Colombe d’Or hotel on the Côte d’Azur, the haunt of artists since the Thirties.

This magical home near noisy Clapham Junction was a bombed-out cobbled mews, a 5,500sq ft site with just a mean two-storey building used as garage and an office in one corner. A concrete slab squatted where now there is a lawn.

Beneath the balcony: Crosland with her design studio co-ordinator, Ivan Done (Charles Hosea)

Crosland bought the site before she married Stephane, who’s in finance. The first phase was to convert the two-storey building to habitable quarters and sort out a basic garden, digging up the concrete and planting evergreens, as well as agapanthus in pots that could be moved around as building progressed. Winter jasmine now covers one wall.

Juggling work, time and money, Crosland had to save up between phases. The first took a year, and was hell, with endless dust. In 1999, with their second son on the way, the couple needed more room. They bought a two-storey building on the other side of the plot, and linked it to the first.

The final, major phase, from 2005 to 2007, pulled everything together. Between the two buildings, Crosland designed a dining room and sitting room, and a long, industrial kitchen that acts both as a room and as a wide corridor, with an oak wood-block floor and steel-and-marble units designed by her sister, interior designer Charlotte Crosland.

A Lacanche French eight-burner stove dominates the kitchen and a row of blue Le Creuset casseroles resembles fat ducks. Steel windows Neisha Crosland designed run right along the garden. Above the kitchen, with a long, ironwork balcony, again by Crosland herself, an office looks down on the elegant garden, where she replaced the cobbles with Yorkstone because of its mellower, lighter colour.

Pulling it all together: the streamlined yet homely kitchen was designed by Crosland to link two buildings into a single home (Charles Hosea)

In the cosy sitting room, the fireplace was made to her sketch by a Polish master plasterer. “I left the sketch and when I came back he had almost finished,” she says. Her paintings are on either side, and scattered throughout.

Comfortable sofas are heaped with cushions in her textiles, seen again in the curtains, while a gilded mural by painter Ian Harper is punctured by a stunning oval window to the garden.

The dining room is artistically elegant. Two magnificent tole chandeliers, great airy nests of metal oak leaves, hang above a long oak table, again by Crosland, while the walls hold mirrored industrial window frames plus works of art, some by her and another Harper mural, this one Japanese in style.

Upstairs the master bedroom and en suite is an elegant reinvention of Thirties glamour, from its thick, white wool carpet which runs into the pale ivory pink-clad bathroom, to the pleated voile at the windows and backing the extraordinarily beautiful mirrored doors that Crosland designed: “I started with the handles, which may have come from a Mughal palace, and worked from there.”

Feast for the eyes: the dining room with long oak table, stunning oak leaf chandeliers, artwork, some by Crosland , and mirrored window frames (Charles Hosea)

It is simpler to list what she didn’t design here. From the padded headboard with its Oriental arches, to the marble, to the fabric on the stool at the end of the bed, it is all her work.

She says, unexpectedly: “Designing a house is like Google Earth. You start with the big picture and then work down and down in increasingly fine detail. But if you get the floors and the radiators and the door handles and the lighting and the light switches and the taps right, the rest will follow. You can fill it in later.”

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As a special treat, buy Crosland’s book, Neisha Crosland: Life of a Pattern , £100 at Merrell Publishers.

, £100 at Merrell Publishers. Neisha Crosland will be in conversation with Fiona McCarthy on March 2 at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey St, SE1. Tickets £9.90.

Framing nature: Neisha Crosland in her cosy sitting room, where a stunning oval window to the garden punctures a gilded mural by London-based artist Ian Harper (Charles Hosea)

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