Material Girl.

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Author: Calvert, Catherine

Before Notting Hill was gentrifiedâ€"before it was even trendyâ€"Celia Birtwell was here, going everywhere, knowing everyone, and designing fresh, witty fabrics for a very chic following. Come say hello.

REALLY REALLY: redâ€"that's the sitting room at Celia'sâ€"but those red felt walls are “such a great back-ground for art,” she says. The wide-striped linen is Celia's “Seraglio Stripe.” Fairy lights encased in plastic tubing circle the French mirror. David Hockney sketched her (opposite) thiry-one years ago in a jacket designed by her then-husband, Ossie Clark.

With its mirrors and boiserie, Celia Birtwell's little shop in Notting Hill is as intimate as a boudoir, hung with fabrics she has designed for the home. Today, the neighboring streets of early Victorian houses are painted in ice-cream colors and decorated decorously by young bankers, but when Celia first came to London from Manchester thirty-odd years ago, this was artists' territory, edgy and full of zest. “We all used to meet at the same pub every Saturday afternoon,” she says, remembering the yeasty mix of young artists and designers who soon drove the “youthquake” that established London as the center for style in the sixties.

One of the trendiest and most popular of the new designers was Ossie Clark, and Celia began to design spriggyflowered fabrics for his fluttery clothes that were snapped up by rockers and celebrities. As a couple (they married in 1969), they knew everyone, went everywhere; their portrait by friend David Hockney hangs in the Tate Gallery.

Twenty years ago, the marriage over, Celia wanted to do something “completely on my own.” A friend offered shop space, she got out her sketch pads and was off. For her first collection of home-furnishing fabrics, she was inspired by a piece of seventeenth-century needlework in the Victoria and Albert Museum and drew a mystical bestiary. Those creatures, printed, like all her designs, on linen, cotton, silk or a particularly nice French plastic, are still favorites.

Her house, nearby the shop, is a merry mix of fifties lamps, sequined fruits, and works by the artists she's been friends with since those early days. And she still prowls the Portobello Market on a Friday, its stalls tumbling with jewels and junk, where she lights on a scrap of old fabric or a Victorian paper-weight. “I see inspiration everywhere,” she says.

For additional information, see page 95.

“Scrave light and color on these gray London days.”

“IT'S SO CHEERY,” says Celia Birtwell, above right, of her Notting Hill home. That's Hockney's latest portrait of her, above left. His picture of her son George as a little boy centers the art, top left. Her own sketch of a coquettish princess inspired the “Madamoiselle” cotton twill on the dining room chairs, opposite (which artist Kay Dimbleby used as a takeoff point for the appliquéd and embroidered pillow, left); Celia's starry “Twinkle” cotton twill serves as a tablecloth.

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TEXT BY Catherine Calvert; PHOTOGRAPHED BY David Montgomery