home run; Luella Bartley swapped clubbing for child care and became a star-selling luxe bags that drive London hipsters crazy, and cool pop prints for a song at Target.(Interview)

Byline: Mark Holgate

Not so long ago, Luella Bartley was shopping at Resurrection Vintage in New York while she was in town from London to show her fall collection. With her infant daughter, Stevie, over her shoulder, she was trying on a Chanel jacket-a classic cardigan style, boucle wool, gilt chain, the works. All was going well . . . she had just decided she wouldn't take it . . . when there was the kind of incident/accident that all mothers are familiar with. Bartley left the store with the Chanel jacket, its right arm still damp. "A thousand dollars," she says, amusedly shaking her head in disbelief, "and I have never even worn it!"

Bartley, 33, has long been a poster child for London cool, and now, just as coolly, she is dealing with the vicissitudes of motherhood. When she founded her label, Luella, as a drunken joke between her and her gang-stylist Katie Grand and designers Katie Hillier and Stuart Vevers-she had no idea where it would take her. It was a venture, she says, founded on "fun and arrogance and silliness." Seven years later, Luella is a strong, successful business. It was the superpopular strappy bags in 2002, swinging with charms, she says, that were the financial tipping point.

And her recent collaboration with Target could be the power tipping point. In less than a decade, she has managed to break through at every level of the American market-and all this from her small-scale operation in London. Paradoxically, Bartley has learned to export her edgy, Anglo cool at a time when she has come to care less and less about being cool herself. It's being a mom that has allowed Bartley to become a brand. "It's the confidence that comes from being in a stable relationship, and having kids," she says. "When you have a life out of fashion, you can look in and say, 'Oh yeah, that's who I am and that's what I do.' "

Bartley has been with her partner, photographer David Sims, for the last four years. Stevie is a year old, and their son, Kip, is three. Right now, they live in Highbury, London, in an airy seventies mews house on a leafy lane, though they are planning to move, at least part-time, to a seventeenth-century farmhouse in Cornwall later this year. "When I first met Dave," Luella says, "this was such a boy's place. There were games and surfboards and guitars everywhere. And when I became pregnant, we said, 'Well, we'd better get to work on it.' "

Much of the furniture and ephemera was found in Cornwall at a cottage that Bartley once owned. There's the sixties Ercol couch and chair, reupholstered in cherry-red wool, which now sit beside an enormous Josef Frank sofa covered in his "Earthy Delights" print. A stash of sweet yet surreal Danish Nymolle porcelain is scattered by the kitchen window. Scandinavia is a big stylistic influence, from the Frank sofa and cushions to the bold, naive floral curtains from a store called Skandium in Marylebone. It's a comfortable, cluttered, unselfconsciously stylish home that could belong to any other creative young London couple were it not for the traces of their working lives: the French nursery linen embroidered stevie was a gift from Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquiere; art by Danny Laidler, who designed this spring's Luella cartoon-face ...