SOME gentlemen might invite a lady to come up and see their etchings, but the art dealer Cassian de Vere Cole, can do better than that. Anyone invited into the front reception room of his West London flat is greeted by a gallery of 20th-century British art.

At the moment he is displaying several pieces by Ann Carrington, including a 6ft-tall imitation of a postage stamp, with Her Majesty’s face picked out in brightly coloured mother-of-pearl buttons, which confronts you as soon as you enter the flat. The work, entitled Pearly Queen, is more of a conversation piece than the average wall-hanging. Elton John, the most famous pearly queen, has bought one of them, and the fashion designer Paul Smith also visited De Vere Cole’s Notting Hill gallery and agreed to make him a suit in exchange for a few Carrington photographs.

While some people work from home, De Vere Cole’s home is his work. After a spell at the auction house Christie’s, he set up his own art dealership when just 26 and decided he could save money by displaying art at his flat in Elgin Crescent. “I bought it in 1993 for £85,000 as a repossession,” he says. “It had been empty for a year and needed a lot of work, but after nine months I was able to hold my first collection.”

The front room doubles as a dining room, but most of the time the table is folded away and invited guests can wander round and look at whatever is on display.

“It’s not an exhibition,” he stresses. “This is first and foremost a residential address, and the only people who come are invited or make an appointment.” But he does hold regular viewings and the likes of Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Charles Saatchi and Michael Palin are among the many celebrities to have popped in for one of De Vere Cole’s famous Sunday brunches. I offer this as an early warning to prospective buyers, in case the doorbell rings while you are in the shower and you find Joanna Lumley on the doorstep wanting to take a peek at your watercolours.

The flat is an ideal place for the man about town. Although the two reception rooms are of a good size, the kitchen is barely big enough to make toast and the bedroom at the back of the house is also rather small, although very quiet. It overlooks one of the many private communal gardens in Notting Hill.

“It would probably suit someone like me, who wants to run a small business from home,” De Vere Cole says. The flat would also suit someone who lives light. “I travel a lot,” he says, “and am at my happiest when living out of a suitcase.” This is obvious from the decoration of his flat. Apart from the artwork, the only personal touches are a collection of travel and art books and a single, faded purple rose dangling from a nail on the stripped-wood bay window.

“I took that from my grandmother’s coffin last December,” he says. This was his maternal grandmother, but his father’s mother gives a clue to his interest in art. She was the notorious Mavis de Vere Cole, one of the bright young things in the 1920s who broke hearts across London. “She was a very famous lover,” De Vere Cole says, his embarrassment mixed with some pride. Her first husband, Horace, was quite a character himself, once pretending to be an Abyssinian prince in order to stow aboard a Royal Navy ship. He had numerous debts, including one to Augustus John, the portrait painter. “The story goes that Horace couldn’t pay the debt, so Augustus took my grandmother in kind,” De Vere Cole says. And although there is no proof that Mavis became pregnant with the painter’s child, De Vere Cole admits that “my father looks more and more like Augustus John each year”.

De Vere Cole is rather proud of his probable grandfather: the first art he displayed was a collection of John’s drawings, and he is keen to promote an exhibition of John’s work that the Tate will be showing in September. Mavis’s story doesn’t end there. In 1939 she married the archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, and in 1954 was sentenced to six months in Holloway prison after shooting another of her lovers, Lord Vivian, in the stomach.

As I leave, looking again at the vivid pearly queen’s head, I can’t help thinking that she is only the second most colourful lady to whom I’ve just been introduced.

• 50 Elgin Crescent is for sale at £575,000 with Bective Leslie Marsh, 020-7221 4805

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