IF YOU want to annoy Naomi Cleaver deeply, to make her positively seethe with indignation, mention the name of our beleaguered Deputy Prime Minister. “Prescott is such a horribly dishevelled man,” she says, her eyes narrowing — and this was before his recent contretemps. “He’s a bit of a Marxist too, and it’s absolutely appalling that it’s left to him to decide where we are all going to live for generations to come. Prescott needs me.”

Cleaver is in “design dominatrix” mode — the persona dreamt up for her by the producers of television homes programmes such as Honey I Ruined The House on Channel 4, during which she trashes the appalling taste of her case studies. Prescott gets another caning at the mention of the Government’s new-build policy. “He’s crazy to want to build about 400,000 toy-box houses on greenfield sites while at the same time knocking down terraces. Give people miserable places to live in and they’ll be miserable. There are plenty of brownfield sites around, and companies like Urban Splash have shown what can be done with them. It stinks, quite frankly.”

And then, as if realising that there are no cameras on her, she says: “Oh dear, am I ranting?” In fact, Cleaver, who is 38, is sitting in the drawing room of her five-storey Georgian home in North London. Our grand plan is that this will be the ideal place for her to justify her own eclectic taste in design.

The house is in an Islington side-street and when Cleaver and her husband, Oliver, bought it in 2001 for £815,000 it was just begging for a designer makeover. It had previously been stripped of every period feature within swiping range of a claw hammer. In Cleaver’s words: “The wiring was shot, the plumbing was shot, there were grey carpets and grey walls and a rotting Seventies pine bathroom. It was simply vile.

But it was also fantastically eccentric and there were workshops in the back, which were exactly what I wanted.”

Fast-forward five years and you find a stylish but not self-consciously trendy home, with a feeling of Victorian solidity about it. It’s full of wit and surprises. Look in the umbrella stand and you’ll find a swordstick and an épée — a nod to the “design dominatrix” label.

The hall has a macabre feel: there’s an impressive chandelier and its walls are painted a dirty millpond shade of green that brings out the deep, blood red of the stair carpet. To the left there’s a comfortable, book-lined study, again in red, and upstairs you find the first-floor drawing room, where the couple do their meeting and greeting.

“I love the contrast of light and dark in here,” she says, standing on the threshold of two sections of the room. “So in this little snug I’ve used peacock green for the walls and black for the sofa and carpet, while the front part of the room is full of light. I really like this fireplace, which predates the house. It’s made of pine — the MDF of the 18th century.” The room illustrates perfectly Cleaver’s take on design, which is essentially pro elegance, wit and integrity of purpose and diametrically opposed to Changing Rooms tackiness and stage-set artificiality. The polished floorboards, the window shutters and the elegant chaise longue, behind which stands an ornate 1930s Guzzini standard lamp, are pure Cleaver. “None of this is expensive in the long term,” she explains hurriedly.

“These boards have been here since 1812 and they’ll last for ever. So why have laminate floors which feel so . . . eughh . . . sticky? “These windows don’t harm the environment and can be painted, so why have UPVC, which is pure evil?” Cleaver’s views are influenced partly by a brief period spent studying design at Kingston upon Thames. But mainly they are the result of a disjointed adolescence. As a child she never lived anywhere for very long, attending seven schools because of her father’s job as an airline pilot. Just before her A levels, at the age of 17, she had a spectacular row at home and ran away to a dingy flat in Paddington, then in 1991 she went to live in Los Angeles for a couple of years. The younger Cleaver was a troubled spirit and she found comfort in improving rooms. “I remember decorating my loft bedroom in the family home in Kent with Habitat wallpaper called Confetti and making the colour scheme beige, which I still find embarrassing.

I’d spend endless hours up there alone, listening to records by The Smiths. “Then, when I left home, I became seriously interested in how I could improve my own living space. I got to love the smell of fresh paint in the morning.”

The kitchen, originally a mess of melamine and Seventies units, is the other room to get the full Cleaver treatment. She has spent a relatively modest £4,000 on a new stainless steel, industrial-style kitchen and central island. The units, which she designed herself, are lit from within and their opaque glass fronts give off an eerie glow. In the adjacent dining area, with its double-height glass ceiling, there is an alarming stag’s head on the wall — a wicked wind-up for veggie dinner party guests, perhaps.

Despite her knowledge of the design world and her access to the best buys on the market, it took Cleaver more than 18 months to decorate the house exactly as she wanted it. Why go to all of that trouble to get everything just so? “Anger informs my design philosophy,” she explains. “Places that are desperately ugly don’t function, so I love to make a room that’s dull into something exciting and interesting. Any building is a three-dimensional legacy to future generations and that’s something we too often forget. Oh dear, am I ranting again?”

A new series of Honey I Ruined The House begins on Channel 4 on May 11. Naomi Cleaver hosts a debate between leading figures from the design world on “Creating the Perfect Interior” at Grand Designs Live at ExCeL in London Docklands on Saturday, June 3, at 3pm

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