The owner of V V Rouleaux's house dazzlingly decorated for Christmas

If you're accustomed to 'doing Christmas' on a grand scale, there's no doubt you need an appropriate backdrop to develop your vision. So, when Annabel Lewis, owner of 'hip haberdasher' V V Rouleaux, found a suitable period farmhouse lying empty in her native Cumbria, she was prepared to fight for it. Unfortunately, the National Trust, the property's owner, was initially resistant to her enthusiasm. 'I badgered them for three years to let me take it on,' Annabel says. 'I kept saying, "We're going to be the most fantastic tenants; we'll make the place superb."'

Last year, Annabel was finally granted permission to move in. 'You have to be able to match yourself to a house and, right from the start, I could see all my furniture here,' she says. 'It was dirty and dingy, but it was still the perfect blank canvas. I always thought it would be a wonderful place to celebrate Christmas.' Twelve months on, the farmhouse has been restored to sparkling splendour and, as Annabel had foreseen, its gracious rooms overlooking the River Derwent offer the ideal platform for staging the festive season.

The core of the house dates back to the seventeenth century, but subsequent generations of solid farming stock added two well-balanced extensions, a smokehouse and, in 1823, a traditional 'bank' barn, which uses the natural slope of the land to give easy access to the upper floor, where hay was stored to feed the cattle below in winter. Annabel has begun using the barn as an exhibition space and has plans to transform it into a regular arts venue.

Annabel herself was born just a few miles from the farm's front door but, as girls in those days typically did, she left for London as a teenager, doing a stint at Lucie Clayton and Cordon Bleu, before landing a job with fashionable foodie Justin de Blank in Belgravia. Here, she was soon put in charge of running the flower stall and, not long after, went on to launch her own florist's. 'I became responsible for the window boxes of 38 pubs all over London,' she says.

It was, however, her inventive way with a bouquet that particularly attracted customer attention. 'I always tried to make everything look exciting and people would ask, "Where do you get all these trimmings?'" In 1990, to satisfy this interest, she opened the first V V Rouleaux shop in Parsons Green, instantly transforming staid English haberdashery from grandma dull to urban cool.

Now located in fashionable Marylebone, V V Rouleaux continues to offer a treasure trove of delightful frills and furbelows to a global clientele that includes major fashion houses, interior decorators and costume designers. Keira Knightley, for example, wore V V Rouleaux silver birds in her hair in the film The Duchess, while the ribbon that trimmed the bridesmaids' dresses at the royal wedding in 2011 was also sourced at the shop.

Inevitably, Christmas is a hectic time at work for Annabel - this year she did the 'look' for the Sloane Square Hotel - but her professional demands never stand in the way of domestic priorities. 'I start with my mother's house in early December and then go on to do four more. I decorate like mad.'

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At the farmhouse, her own three daughters and son, all now in their twenties, return home from work and university, and insist on the traditional tree with all the trimmings - a demand easily met from the contents of Annabel's tea chests, which are packed with such long-time favourites as a parade of wooden huntsmen, an array of brilliantly coloured Mexican tin ornaments and a cluster of oversize light bulbs, which Annabel recycled from Parsons Green railway station in the Eighties and then painted in primary stripes.