'An Expression of You': Fashion virtuoso Matthew Williamson talks about reshaping his world

A simple list," says Matthew Williamson. "Twenty questions. Like, counting on your fingers, what's your design icon? What's your favorite restaurant? Do you have a prized possession? What's your favorite artist? That kind of thing." This is how fashion designer-turned-interior designer Williamson begins each project, sitting down with his client, creating a moodboard, before heading back out and thinking deeply about, say, the color pink. Do you have a favorite decade? What is your favorite perfume ? What is your earliest childhood memory? But this list, he points out, is not just for wealthy clients: it is useful for everyone. "If you're remodeling your kitchen and you're struggling, which obviously people are because there's so much to choose from online, such a barrage of visuals, it's pretty cool to use these questions to really ask yourself: what do I like?

The quick response, looking around his high-ceilinged London flat, is "This." We love this, Matthew, this happy and playful house, with its mint green bedroom, blue doors, green doors, the feeling on entering that you are entering a large velvet corner of sunshine. The living room, which we sit in today, looking out at the garden through the ceiling-high windows, has pale pink walls ("I don't really see it as pink, to be honest – that's really a solution warmer than beige") against a tobacco-colored window alcove ("Hackney Gold it's called. By a brand called Pickleson paint that does pretty colors, including one called Pissy Yellow") and its elegant collection of vintage lighted furniture by a glass chandelier that once hung in his New York store.

He closed the fashion business he had built with his partner of 30 years, Joseph Velosa (the two now have a daughter, and lives between London and Mallorca) seven years ago, after decades as a household name. He looks exactly the same today as he once did in the tabloids and fashion magazines, suave and feline, nipping cigarettes out the window as we chat. In the '90s, Williamson's face was as recognizable as her clothes: brightly colored bohemian-chic party dresses worn by Kate Moss and Sienna Miller and all their fellow it-girls. As he launched his career, the American editor of Vogue Anna Wintour, looking at a dress he had made in a patchwork of pieces of pink sari, told him says, "You should have a pink dress in every collection. He took her advice.

But Williams was obsessed with the power of color his whole life. in Manchester, he saw how his mother,