Blanc beauty

Carolyn Quartermaine likes to balance life in Nice with the busyness of London. Photo / Supplied

In the cool interior of artist and textile designer Carolyn Quartermaine's home in Nice in the south of France, all of the walls and much of the furniture are white, creating an atmosphere which feels floaty and somewhat disorientating. This sensation is anchored - but only just - by enormous colour-stained canvases propped against walls and in front of windows so that the sunlight filters through the stretched calico.

A staircase leads from the mainly open-plan ground floor to her bedroom. One floor up is a mezzanine level, which in turn leads up to a studio on the top floor. Adjoining the bedroom is a plant-filled terrace with a view of the sun-drenched garden below, full of orange and olive trees, grape-laden vines, wisteria and strawberries. The vines grow so rampantly on the wall skirting the plunge pool that they trail into the water. It's an idyllic spot: the perfect place to create her painterly hand-dyed textiles.

Quartermaine's career took off in the early 80s. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, London, she made her mark creating fabrics adorned with swirly, old-world calligraphy. "They were drawn from 18th-century French texts," she explains.

"This was the post-punk era, and my generation of designers were passionate about history."

This mood had its roots in the New Romantic movement. London's creative scene then was very small, so everyone knew each other - John Galliano, Tom Dixon, Andre Dubreuil and Quartermaine, who explains their style was nicknamed "neo-baroque".

In 1984, Galliano cut a swashbuckling swathe with his debut collection inspired by the French Revolution. Quartermaine's designs had a similar aesthetic. "They incorporated collages of the French flag," she explains. "This romanticism got a second wind in the late 80s because 1989 was the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution."

In 1986, Quartermaine had her first big break after she rang the then owner of Liberty's department store in London, to see if she could show him her work. "He liked it and gave me the entire fourth floor - and the main Regent St window - to exhibit in for a month."

Soon Terence Conran, Manolo Blahnik and Nicky Haslam were also snapping up her designs. In 1991, the fashion designer Donna Karan phoned her out of the blue to ask her to design her homeware.

Quartermaine has since created window displays for Louis Vuitton, packaging for Fortnum & Mason and interiors for the restaurant and bar Sketch, in the West End of London. Last year she was named designer of the year at the high-profile Paris design fair Maison et Objet, created the interiors of retailer Joseph Ettedgui's home in France, and revamped London fashion and homeware boutique The Shop at Bluebird, kitting it out in a richly eclectic spectrum of furniture which is all for sale: calico-upholstered Louis XVI sofas, 60s tables covered in colourful tiles, Moroccan tables, chandeliers hung very low ...

A forthcoming project is the renovation of the interiors of Belgium's medieval Chateau de Beloeil.

Quartermaine owns another home in southwest London but has always loved Nice. "This house belonged to my friend, the designer Jacqueline Morabito," she explains. "Later it was an art gallery, which I used to pop in to when I came on holiday to this area. But it closed and lay empty for three years. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision to buy it."

It was sold at auction following an ancient, local tradition used when selling abandoned houses: "There were three magistrates and a burning candle. As the candle burns down, people say their bids and whoever bids just as the flame dies, wins - and I won."

Although her home is a laboratory for her ideas, she describes it primarily as a retreat: "I can really delve into my work here; get lost in it since it's so quiet." But she admits she's also a stalwart urbanite: "Too long here and I miss the energy of London."

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