by Annabel Bird

My five favourite stores in Design Centre Chelsea Harbour
The Design Centre in Chelsea Harbour (DCCH) is Europe’s largest interior design shopping destination. With 102 showrooms and 500 international brands it offers London’s most comprehensive collection of high-end interior design stores. The brands housed at DCCH are most definitely the expensive ones, but it is a fantastic resource for interior designers, particularly for sourcing fabrics and wallpaper.

The centre is comprised of three large glass-domed shopping areas supplemented by an additional set of showrooms in the Design Centre East, in the same building as KLC. The shopping centre has a slightly ethereal feel - other than during London’s two design weeks it is quiet, chilled out and relaxed and is about as far as one can get from the craziness of Westfield on a Saturday before Christmas. It is dog friendly - most of the showrooms welcome our four-pawed friends, which is handy as interior designers seem to be more likely to have dogs than any other professionals except perhaps shepherds.

With so many brands to choose from it can be hard to navigate and so I have rounded up my five favourite stores - I like all of these showrooms because they sell fun, witty and unusual products and are the antitheses of the taupe heavy showhome blandness that high end stores can so often be afflicted by.

Porta Romana
Porta Romana creates fantastic lamps imbued with wit and humour, qualities that are generally missing from the world of lighting. Their lamps are expensive but are extremely good quality and will last a lifetime. Their perfume lamp and duck feet lamp are now iconic and I was delighted to discover their new range of cosy felt lampshades on my last visit. The other great thing about Porta Romana is that they can IP rate many of their wall lights rendering them suitable for bathrooms. If you have every designed a bathroom you will know how dismal most IP rated lights are and Porta Romana is definitely one to bear in mind for this purpose.