Nicky Haslam: Age shall not wither him

Interior decorator, diarist, social butterfly... Nicky Haslam is well known to the readers of everything from 'Harper's & Queen' to 'Hello!'. But it's terribly hard work staying in the invitees' premier league, and that's where the surgeon's knife and the dye bottle come in handy...

Nicky Haslam – interior designer, gossip columnist, sensational party-goer – lives, as it happens, in quite a nasty, 1950s mansion block in London's South Kensington, right on Cromwell Road, with traffic thundering past. When I ring the entryphone thing, I can't hear a word he's saying, so in the end he comes to the main door to collect me, and then I follow him and his rather spooky, dyed-black hair-do down to his basement flat. What colour is your hair underneath, Nicky? "Oh, it's top of the milk. The worst colour," he replies.

He is chain-smoking, as usual. At one point, I think he has several cigarettes on the go in several ashtrays. I ask him if he dyes his hair to match his lungs. He says not. He says he recently had a full check-up and "my doctor phoned and said you don't deserve this news, but your lungs are crystal clear". Sometimes, he gets a cough, "but if it's a smoker's cough that's all right. As long as it's not a real cough."

He adds that he may appear tired today, but that's only because he is. He went with Cilla Black to see Elaine Stritch's show last night and "my dear, you try getting Cilla to bed. At 3am we were still in the Shadow Lounge." Do you ever not feel like going out, Nicky? "Sometimes I feel dead at 5pm, but I always perk up by 6pm." The difference between us, I tell him, is that I usually feel dead at 5pm and even deader by 6pm. This may be why I'm not a great party-goer, and rarely receive invitations. Actually, that's not strictly true. The nurse at my GP's practice recently invited me in for a smear test, which was nice of her, as she keeps inviting and I never invite her back or anything. I'm still fretting about what to wear. I don't want to turn up in evening dress and look the fool.

Nicky's got the kettle on, so it's into his kitchen which, considering his decorating style – quite rich old dowager, I would say, with lots of tassels and chandeliers and such like – is remarkably plain. I can only recall that it's cream. It's certainly not a cook's kitchen, mostly because Nicky does not cook. At least, not in London. He has a country place, an exquisite National Trust property in Hampshire, where he goes at the weekends, and there he will do "roast chicken, roast lamb, something like that".

But here, if he's in (which is rare, admittedly) it's sandwiches made from Kraft processed cheese slices and white Kingsmill bread. Or, at least, it used to be white Kingsmill bread, but he's given it up, for the sake of his waistline, so now it's Kraft processed cheese slices on rice cakes, and do you know what? It's magnificent. "Because rice cakes taste of fuck-all, the taste of the cheese is fantastic." He also likes Dairylea cheese triangles and that Primula stuff squeezed into his mouth "straight from the tube". Some might say that Nicky Haslam's giddy world is one of such air-kissing, mightily tasselled artifice, not even the cheese can be bothered to be real.

There's a noticeboard in here, absolutely dripping with invitations to openings and whatnot from Tiffany, Bulgari, the National Gallery, as well as those from Lord and Lady So-and-So who say they're "at home", which is mystifying, as they are so obviously not. They're "at home" at Claridges, or wherever. What is this about? I've no idea. I think it's an upper-class thing. (Nicky's mother, Diamond Louise Constance Ponsonby, was a goddaughter of Queen Victoria.) Also, magazine clippings of Nicky's various style icons are pinned up. There's one of Enrique Iglesias wearing red leather trousers with a pronounced snakeskin effect. Nicky says he is trying to find such a pair for himself. (Lord, I hope he doesn't!) There's one of David Beckham doing the undone-dungaree look. You know, straps flapping, bib swinging. Nicky says he spent a long time looking at that picture, wondering how David got the dungarees to stay at waist level, and not fall to his ankles.

In the end, Nicky came up with his own solution. "I pinned the bib to my underpants!" Today, Nicky is wearing Topman jeans – "I worship Topman" – and a camouflage top from "the best army- surplus store. It's in Martha's Vineyard." Nicky, who is 63, hopes his look is "street", although he doesn't specify which street. Old Street, maybe? Great Queen Street? Only teasing, Nicky! Honestly, though, if he strives to get any younger, he'll soon be turning up in Baby Gap. I wonder, do they do red leather snakeskin-effect Babygros? With matching scratch mitts?

Anyway, the thing about Nicky that I think stops him from being as ridiculous as he could be is that he doesn't hide anything. Or, at least, doesn't appear to hide anything. Who knows what anyone really hides? There's an open box of Viagra on the side in his kitchen. "Wonderful stuff, although a new pill has just come out which you don't have to wait for." How long do you have to wait for Viagra to kick in? "An hour!" Are you seeing someone? "Yes. But I don't want to say too much. It's in its early stages." The heart-fluttering stage? "Oh no. It's much more carnal than that."

He will happily talk about his full face-lift and his Botox treatments. "It's quite good, although you can't frown for a bit." He has his hair dyed by Christophe at Smile twice monthly, while he dyes his own body hair in the bath. "I come out looking like a gorilla." It must leave a terrible bath ring, though? "Not too bad, really."

The only thing he's balked at is liposuction, although not through want of trying. He once asked his "lovely, darling surgeon" about liposuction, because he hates his love-handles, but the surgeon advised him against it. "He said that he could do it, but I'd die." He grabs his aforementioned handles between thumb and forefinger, then adds: "He said this roll here is actually my stomach, which rolled over to one side when I had polio as a child." In the end, Nicky chose life over liposuction, but it might have been quite a close-run thing.

Nicky insists he isn't vain. "It's just that I hate the way I look." He was a "chokingly beautiful child", he says, but when, at seven, he contracted the polio and had to lie in bed for three years, in plaster from the waist down, he emerged at 10 as "a fat blob". And he's wanted to transform himself ever since. Indeed, as he sees it, if you hated the way a room looked, you'd maybe paint it and shift the furniture around a bit, wouldn't you? So why not play about with your physical appearance? (He may, now I think about it, be as much an exterior decorator as an interior one.)

He says that if he could come back in a next life looking like someone else, he'd probably choose Elvis Presley. "The young Elvis Presley." Or maybe James Dean. His first big crush was on James Dean. Nicky was at Eton when James Dean died. "I cried and cried," he says.

Into the sitting room now, which is more Nicky-ish, with its deep plum walls, enormous plum sofa, classic busts, Louis Vuitton upholstered chairs, a silvery-blue cushion made from hand-beaded, hand-sequinned, hand-embroidered material that's so gaudy it's magnificent. He says it's the sort of material north-London Jewish ladies would like to wear for their son's Bar Mitzvahs. As a north-London Jew myself, I'm momentarily minded to be offended, but then I recall it's almost exactly what my mum wore to my brother's Bar Mitzvah, so decide I'm on weak ground. The material is actually, he continues, a remnant from a £20,000 tablecloth he had made for a client. A £20,000 tablecloth? Is there such a thing? Well, he says, "it did have ermine tassels hung from gold coins".

Nicky, needless to say, works at the upper end of the market. Bryan Ferry, Charles Saatchi, the Prince of Wales have all been clients, as have umpteen Euro-princelings and all those old dowagers, I imagine. I don't think he could work within budgetary constraints. Nicky adores extravagance. One of his heroes is Prince Orlov, the 18th-century Russian who, on entertaining Catherine the Great, thought his grounds looked dull, "so he sprinkled the grass with diamonds". But while Nicky adores extravagance, he insists he is not particularly extravagant himself. "My idea of extravagance is buying three pairs of jeans in Topman because I can't make up my mind."

I say Nicky, you've mentioned Topman so much that a discount card is bound to be winging its way to you. He says he doesn't need a discount card. He says he already has a card with "F.R.E.E" on it. Yes, Nicky is showered with freebies because, frankly, who else goes to so many A-list parties? What better advertising hoarding?

Later, Nicky gives me a present: a bottle of perfume, Ferme Tes Yeux, by JAR, who are, apparently, very famous Parisian jewellers specialising in rare gems. The perfume, he says, is worth £500 – £500! – but doesn't suit him, isn't "sharpened pencils" enough. (He loves the smell of sharpened pencils.) Nicky, I say, while snatching the bottle with a speed that astonishes even me, I just couldn't. Nicky, I add, while putting it in my handbag and checking it's all zipped in, don't be silly. The perfume is lovely, much better than my usual Impulse (Ocean Wave) rubbish. I take back my rude remarks about rich old dowagers and proper cheese. I wear shockingly expensive perfume now. I must try not to be so cheap.

We're here, ostensibly, to discuss Nicky's book, Sheer Opulence. It's Nicky's first book, surprisingly, and it's full of glorious photographs of some of the wickedly opulent, marble-staircased homes he has decorated over the years. Your worst job, Nicky? "I did a house in Belgravia. It was amazing. Absolutely amazing. Very, very wonderful. The couple moved in over the weekend and when I came back on Monday, they'd hung up painting-by-numbers pictures of their parents on the wall and had put copper bowls of mother-in-law's tongue on the floors. Awful."

Actually, the more I look through the book the more I rather take to Nicky's over-the-top, 18th-century style. At least it makes a change from boring minimalist chic and all those shades of white, none of which I can tell apart, anyway. Nicky is not especially keen on mass-market design. He's not into Conran. "I use the Conran shop for things for bathrooms but I'm not a devotee of his look. It's for people who think they can decorate for themselves, isn't it?" He isn't mad on television makeover programmes, either. "The results are ghastly, although at least they are having a go."

He thinks, these days, that styling has triumphed over proper decoration. "You know, it's three boxes with an orange on top." I ask him if he ever thinks that being a party-goer and gossip columnist (he writes for the Evening Standard magazine as well as Hello!) prevents people from taking him seriously as a designer. "But I'm not a gossip columnist," he exclaims, truly hurt and offended. "I'm a diarist." He's about to pack in the Hello! column, by the way. "I've been doing it for some years and feel I'm repeating myself." I'm not convinced repetition is entirely against Hello! policy – blimey, they seem to have done Jane Seymour and her dining table (from every angle) at least 569 times in the last six months alone – but there you go.

His mother, as I've said, was terribly posh, as was his father, William, who came from a background of rich Yorkshire trade. The Haslams, as it happens, invented Aertex, so if you've ever shivered in the stuff as an outside fielder at rounders at school, you now know who to blame. The bout with polio was, as you've probably gathered already, very formative for Nicky, and it even accounts for his great love of decoration. "I had to lie flat on my back for three years and could move only my arms. Though for the life of me I can't think why, my parents had a large-scale model house made by Lavender Herbert, the daughter of their great friend, the author and musician AP Herbert. The house could be pulled across my bed, and I would paint it and rearrange the furniture, constantly coming up with new decorative schemes for various imaginary occupants." At Eton, he immediately decorated his study "with fake ocelot-skin curtains, cut-paper ostrich-plume pelmets and a carpet of artificial grass". He then went to art school, but only for three weeks. "It was raffia. I left."

There was a spell in New York, with Vogue, and then it was back to London in 1972 to design a flat for Lord Hesketh. You'd think that, with all the partying, he'd not be any good at long-term relationships but, as it happens, he is. He's had three major ones ("and I've always been faithful") and is friends with all his ex's. "Just because they find someone else, it doesn't mean I no longer love them." He is, indeed, quite ludicrously lovable. Certainly, his fellow party-goers love him, as he loves them. Cilla, he says, "radiates joy", while Kate Moss "is just so tactile. It's like being touched by a velveteen monkey."

We part affectionately, and now I'm going to respond to the one, strangely un-gilt-edged invitation on my noticeboard. I'm still not sure what to wear, but I'm pretty certain about the perfume. Ferme Tes Yeux? Too bloody right. I doubt Cilla and Kate will be there.

'Sheer Opulence' is published by Cico Books at £29.99