A floral designer's charming Chelsea mews house decorated for Christmas

“You don’t want things too precious at Christmas,” says the floral designer Paul Hawkins, surveying the decorations he has created for his own charming mews house in Chelsea, “but then neither do you want it to look like…” he considers for a moment, “a tart’s boudoir.” It’s a philosophy that could equally be applied to many an appealing decorative scheme, and indeed seems to sum up the current interiors mood rather well. Paul should know, having begun his career as an interior designer before building a hugely successful floristry business.

Paul and his partner Steven Jenkins bought the house five years ago. “When it was built, it would have been occupied by canal workers or gravediggers,” says Paul. Since then, like the rest of the neighbourhood, the house has come up in the world. Its previous owner was the actress Susan Hampshire, who had knocked it through with three other houses in the same terrace, and during whose tenure it achieved a glamour it couldn’t have imagined back in its salad days. “It was beautifully opulent when we bought it,” recalls Paul, “all cream and gold and smoked glass – definitely a look.”

Without banishing all traces of glamour - two of Susan’s marvellously formal Italian strung window dressings have survived to bear witness to her reign – the house has an altogether more relaxed air under its current inhabitants. Their first priority was to open up the kitchen, building out into the garden and installing Crittall windows to flood the room with light. With this done, Paul wanted to give the house a “cosy, comfortable country cottage look,” which well suits the small size of a mews house. The couple juggle opposing aesthetics; during his interior design years Paul worked at Colefax & Fowler, Nina Campbell and Jane Churchill; his partner, on the other hand, trained as an architect and “would prefer to live in a Brutalist box”, as Paul remarks. “But I won on the decorative front.”

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Paul’s bold way with colour and ecumenical approach to furniture prevents any suggestion of tweeness, however. Pieces from his days in the Colefax antiques department mingle with funky mid-century furniture and accessories from OKA, whose founder Annabel Astor is a neighbour. He cites his friends Veere Grenney, Gavin Houghton and Luke Edward Hall as influences, all of whom are masters, in one way or another, of updating the classic country house look. The sitting room is a case in point; painted in Farrow & Ball’s elegant ‘Oval Room Blue’ and hung with landscape paintings, it is at first sight a traditional space. Yet the lucite coffee table, the “glitzy rococo-y things” in the window, and the modern armchairs covered in brown linen, give it a pleasingly unstudied air.