How I transformed this former West London squat into my dream home

‘When you know, you just know,’ says Eliza Bailey, sitting in the full sunshine flooding through her wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling bifold doors, looking out on a garden loaded with flowers.

‘People say this about love. I’ve never had it with love, but as soon as I walked in – it was horrible but I knew this was my home.’

Not that it would have been obvious to anyone else. The first thing the travel PR had to do was clear out the mattresses from when it had been a squat.

The video she shows me on her phone from her first viewing is of an unprepossessing one-bedroom flat with grubby white walls, damaged floorboards and a huge satellite dish. And there was no water or electricity.

‘I said I wanted a project,’ she jokes, now that it’s done, ‘but I had no idea the work it would take! I loved every bit of it, but if I hadn’t been living with my parents, it wouldn’t look like this.’

Now, eight years later – Eliza bought it when she was 30 and moved in two years later – the flat we’re sitting in could belong to a movie star. A clever movie star. Maybe Cate Blanchett.

‘I’d already had an offer accepted on a garden flat in Chiswick – two bedrooms, two baths – which cost less than this and didn’t need any work, but for some reason I just knew,’ says Eliza, who admits she used to claim this was Chiswick when it’s actually Acton.

‘If you threw a stone, you’d hit Chiswick, but people would come round and go, “Why are you lying?”’ She laughs and rolls her eyes at her silliness. ‘I got shamed.’

Apart from almost doubling the size with a huge extension that’s now her kitchen-living space – ‘the best dinner parties happen in here,’ Eliza nods towards a picture that reads Up To No Good – she totally reconfigured it. The corridor was placed down the middle instead of at the side, which is more usual for Victorian buildings such as this.

The dodgy floorboards were replaced with with custom-made, unvarnished parquet and then Eliza loaded her home with memories from her years of travelling around the world.

‘Most of the stuff in here is from just three shops,’ she says. ‘One in Marrakesh, one in Johannesburg and one in India. I go back and back and back. The tiles in the bathroom were 50p each, but then I spent a fortune on having them shipped.’

Eliza opens a kitchen drawer to show a collection of bowls collected from her travels. They’re mostly dirt cheap but gorgeous.

‘Those pictures are from Cameroon but I bought them in Johannesburg. Basically the guy who owns it shops the whole of Africa, so it’s a really easy way for me – when I’m working there – to speed-shop.’ She continues, pointing. ‘India, India… I did a sabbatical there for three months, an antique shop in Devon. The picture of the guy diving is just because it’s sexy.’

In among the books that line the walls – travel, gardening, Cézanne – is a coffee table tome on designer Kit Kemp, the woman behind the hotel group that takes in the Covent Garden Hotel, the Soho Hotel and New York’s Crosby Street Hotel.

‘It’s not that I wanted my home to look like a hotel,’ jokes Eliza, ‘but I liked how folky she was. Buying stuff is a bit intuitive – you see it, buy it and find a space for it – but I think I’ll have to start looking for a bigger house now.’

Her home also has tiger heads from Mexico – there’s even a big leopard head in the cleaning cupboard – busts from Morocco and huge necklaces made from shells Eliza picked up while working in Bali. ‘The nude lady lamp is eBay, though,’ she says. ‘There’s Etsy, eBay, Goodwood antiques fair, the tropical headboard my dad did for me – he also re-covered that chair.’ A beautiful porcelain cathedral turns out to be Eliza’s GCSE art project.

‘Doing up the flat cost so much more than I thought, I ended up with no money, so this was £50 at an antiques fair,’ she says, pointing at a sideboard. ‘This was from an auction site’ – a lamp featuring a beautiful black girl – ‘and this was from Kempton Park, which has an antiques fair’ – a desk.

‘Because I was so poor, there was a woman who does a life-drawing class in Hammersmith and I paid £10 for each. I think they’re her cast-offs,’ she jokes. ‘It’s a good way of filling space when you have no money. And they’re all just Ikea frames. I don’t really do on-trend stuff because I want it to last for ever.’

And it’s important to Eliza that the flat is a place to live, not a show home.

‘When I got marble worktops, people warned me against it, and after I got my first mark I spent three days trying to fix it – but, like with the floors getting marks, it’s the signs of a house well lived. The patina of life.’

She looks around, glowing. ‘I just love this flat,’ she says. You see, love at first sight is a thing.’

MORE : ‘Skinny’ Bristol townhouse up for sale at £325,000

MORE : Groovy baby: how to add 1970s style to your home