Just another top-floor tenement flat on the outside, but inside a bright, kitschy vibrant space where a flamboyant clothing designer showcases her unusual talents and quirky vintage styling

IRENE Wadsworth has a framed picture of Basil Brush in her hall, an initial clue to the personality colouring this home. With her label Impractical Clothes, Wadsworth is an innovative fashion designer based in Edinburgh. Her retail and working space, called Shop, showcases classic cocktail dresses and tailored suits you'd wear to the office alongside styles most would love to have the confidence to consider, patchwork sheepskin dresses and PVC corsets among them. Everything is handmade and while items can be bought off the peg, most are bespoke designs.

While Wadsworth's home (of 14 years) is a conventional, top-floor tenement flat, its interior is born of her flamboyance. Most people would brighten a hall receiving no natural light with white, while she painted walls (and ceiling) red. Door frames and skirting boards are highlighted in silver to dramatically showcase the aforementioned Mr Brush, and there's a stag head barometer (her grandfather's) and handmade Elvis mirror.

Just as her fashion collection reveals a Fifties' penchant, elements of this home wouldn't look out of place in Grease. It's easy to imagine John Travolta sitting at her Formica-topped folding table, from the Sam Burns scrap yard in Prestonpans.

"I've always been fixated by the Fifties," says Wadsworth, "and wanted to recreate a retro diner". When she moved in, floorboards were bare and walls magnolia and she's steadily purged the place of monotony, painting kitchen walls and units pale blue and laying chequerboard flooring, bought nearby in Leith. Wadsworth customised much of the furniture, re-upholstering mismatched, painted kitchen chairs with black and white checked PVC. The same material covers a bench, found by one of the many people who have successively occupied her spare room.

Affectionately named 'the skip raker', Wadsworth never complained when her flatmate appeared home with another treasure, a bullet-shaped object which now sits on a work-surface and always generates conversation since no one is really sure what it is.

Also picking up pieces in charity shops, such as a distinctive black vase, Wadsworth's collections of the kitsch and unusual are imbued by a warm, romantic spirit. Painted cherubs, which she makes herself, are dotted throughout the house. Wadsworth's interest in interior design has become such that she says she would like to include customised furniture alongside clothes within Shop in the future.More evidence of her skills is found in the bedroom, entered via a bead curtain emblazoned with her favourite target symbol.   [cont. -->]