A light, spacious 18th-century country house decorated in a traditional manner

Twenty years ago, a visit to the basement of Mona Perlhagen’s home on Thurloe Square, SW7, was just like entering Aladdin’s Cave of Wonders. Teeming with antique embroidered fabrics, each more beautiful than the last, this was the birthplace of Chelsea Textiles. Fabrics created in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries provided inspiration for exquisite reproductions, made with the same glorious colours and attention to detail by embroiderers in Kashmir – many of whom have now been working with the company for 25 years.

Since the opening of her first shop on Walton Street, SW3, in 1995, Mona’s reputation has grown and designers such as Robert Kime, Alidad, Neisha Crosland, Domenica More Gordon and Kit Kemp now produce collections under the umbrella of Chelsea Textiles. Mona’s second shop, which is also on Walton Street and opened in 2000, sells a range of furniture – initially with a Gustavian influence (Mona’s husband is from Sweden and she lived there for seven years) and now including pieces adapted to contemporary interiors.

In 2005, Mona’s daughter Jenny, having studied history of art and interior design in both London and New York, was made the company’s chief designer. ‘I loved what my mother had started,’ explains Jenny. ‘I would always travel with her to India or Sweden for auctions, so this has been a natural progression. She is also wonderful at encouraging new ideas.’ Mona is quick to add that Jenny has contributed greatly to developing the furniture side of the business and is responsible for much of the success of this element of the company.

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The mother-daughter collaboration is illustrated in their recent decoration of a beautiful eighteenth-century house in Oxfordshire that is now the company’s design centre. It offers a relaxing contrast to their London lives and is also used by the whole family as a weekend getaway. The house had been through the normal vicissitudes of different owners and many of the original 2,500 acres had been sold off. Today, the family has bought back some of the acreage, so that the house stands happily surrounded by its land – as befits its heritage.

Mona and Jenny chose, where possible, to restore the house to the original layout, while at the same time allowing for all the family members – which includes Jenny’s husband and two young sons, as well as her brother and his wife – to have their own space when they are there together. Jenny spent many hours in the local records office, digging out old documents relating to the house and doing extensive research, as well as collaborating with architects, historians and English Heritage. It was decided to scale down the living room – one huge room running from front to back – thus creating a small library at the front of the house and a more manageable living room overlooking the parkland at the back. This was achieved by introducing a curved corridor two thirds of the way down the room, which, when being installed, was found to be within an inch of one that had previously existed. The resulting two rooms have now been restored to their original height and scale.

The huge kitchen at the back of the house had been a patchwork of rooms with a large safe in the centre – presumably for storing the silverware such houses would once have used. They knocked down all the walls and, in the space, Plain English built an enviably large larder and units for a kitchen with three huge windows overlooking the courtyard and stables. A corridor leads to a light-filled breakfast room for small gatherings, while on the other side of the house, overlooking the grounds, is a large grand dining room that seats up to 20 guests.