Liberty's chief in love with a lady of Regent Street

Business Profile: The emporium's chief executive believes that restoring the elegance and beauty of the 'ship of state' will help to revive her fortunes

Iain Renwick is jubilant. He has managed to persuade The Independent's photographer to snap him in the huge atrium of Liberty's Tudor building behind Regent Street in London. This, the passionate Glaswegian reckons, is the future of the "venerable old lady" rather than the timbered mock-Tudor exterior (our photographer's first choice).

Mr Renwick, 45, who reaches his first anniversary as boss of the loss-making landmark store tomorrow, is seeking to "reclaim Liberty's birthright" and breathe fresh life into the site that savvy shoppers abandoned long ago for trendy Selfridges. "I think it's Liberty's moment," he says, in his soft Scottish burr. "The door has been opened wide with the undercurrents in home and fashion and the resonance of the decorative arts in the home."

In turning round the "ship of state", as he terms the 129-year-old store, the one-time Habitat man is letting the beauty of Liberty speak for itself. Shabby carpets have been ripped out, dowdy shop fittings consigned to the dustbin. Whole walls, in some cases, have been removed to reveal period windows obscured for decades by former owners' fixation with all things beige and dingy. "Who the hell designed that?" he exclaims, as he gives me the guided tour, pointing to a particularly unattractive central till in the only part of the womenswear department not to have had the Renwick touch. "They must have been blind."

The burnished wooden floorboards, beams and columns, built from the timbers of HMS Impregnable and Hindustan, reek of a glamour and elegance that rivals can only dream of. "I want the floor to be bashed. I want customers to say 'I love this'," he clamours, flinging his arms round an ornately carved pillar.

As if to emphasise that the building itself is a work of art, "work in progress" signs are dotted around the shop's four storeys while the makeover is completed. The refurbishment initiative has gone into overdrive during the past two months to get the place looking its eclectic best before the Christmas rush. In true emporium fashion, Liberty's goodies are dotted throughout the building. Each shop fitting and ornament is for sale - even the giant chandelier in the atrium, should you have a spare £15,000. But you'd better be quick if you want to beat Mr Renwick. A glance at the tags on some of the apparently decorative chairs and tables that litter the boudoir-styled womenswear enclave, home to top labels such as Alice Temperley, Dries Van Noten and Balenciaga, reveals that he has got there first. A 1960s Fontana Art hanging lamp, priced £1,700, is his, as are a pair of Art Deco chairs, a 1950s table whose origin passed me by, and a rather elegant, if less-than-comfortable-looking, sofabed. They are awaiting shipment to the house he and his partner have bought in Luca, northern Tuscany.

But Liberty needs to be about more than just a historic emporium (it is not, Mr Renwick insists, a department store) if it is to earn its crust within the Marylebone Warwick Balfour property empire. MWB, the store's majority investor, acquired Liberty after a decade of bitter wrangling between shareholders and board members, including an offspring of its founder, Arthur Lasenby Liberty, had failed to revive the company. Mr Renwick knows he has a fight on his hands just to get Londoners to take Liberty seriously again, let alone the flighty fashion fraternity.

His aim, he tells me from the confines of his pokey corner office, is to achieve that "illusory goal of creating a brand with resonance in the international marketplace". He adds: "The confusion with Liberty is when you try to say its wonderful heritage is a brand." His plan is to develop a range of Liberty of London-branded clothing and accessories that can be sold in top-drawer department stores around the world. The childrenswear range was launched last month and is already available in New York's upmarket Barneys and Bergdorf Goodman stores.

"The only British player to have broken through, I would say, post-war, is Burberry," he says wistfully. "Would I say that I would like to do a Burberry? I would like to aspire to deliver a relevant Liberty brand, whose idiosyncrasies and uniqueness can be developed and allowed to manifest beyond the fiefdom of Regent Street."

He is anxious that for "brand", people do not read "print" - for all that, he practically greets me with the fact that his royal blue striped shirt, worn open-necked with a navy blue suit, is a Liberty print. He is particularly keen to break the intrinsic link between Liberty and floral print; its ubiquitous "Tana Lawn" design has become something of a watchword for the store. Instead, Mr Renwick draws the analogy with Hermès, the French luxury goods brand par excellence. "If the equestrian motif is a signature to the Hermès brand, print is a signature to Liberty. But it won't have to be there to make Liberty a branded product."

Born and brought up in Glasgow, he laughs when I ask whether his was a retailing family. "My parents were good shoppers, but not retailers, no," he said. The answer might be different for future generations of Renwicks, however. His twin brother, Colin, is managing director of Ikea Norway, which makes him "a very good sounding board". And an older brother, Drew, is in the wine trade, although his sister is a doctor.

Running Liberty might not seem the obvious vocation for a law graduate, but then again, Mr Renwick's is not the classic retail CV. From Storehouse, where he worked at the lifestyle store Habitat in the early 1990s alongside Sir Terence Conran and Vittorio Radice, he went to MTV, the satellite music channel. He joined Retail Stores, Liberty's parent company, from Imagination, a design agency.

While retailing may not be in Mr Renwick's blood, Liberty certainly is. "I take an evangelical approach to the brand. It fits me like a hand in a glove." It probably helps that his house in Chiswick, west London, is Arts and Crafts, the back-to-basics movement epitomised by William Morris's aphorism: "Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful." It was even designed by Arthur Liberty's couturier, Edward William Godwin, a fact that he says "gives me goose bumps".

Although analysts cite a litany of hurdles when it comes to Liberty, from the historic lack of basic retailing disciplines to the challenges of operating from a listed building, former colleagues are more optimistic. Mr Radice, the man responsible for transforming Selfridges, thinks Liberty could be the next Colette, the most fashionable store in Paris. "It could be the new shop in London," the Italian says with passion.

All Mr Renwick knows is that Liberty will have to make a lot of new friends, and fast, if it is to succeed. "The little lady from Winchester, who comes up at the weekend with her friend for a little silk scarf and a wee toilet bag," he says, describing a typical Liberty shopper. "Well that ain't my future. It can't be, because it doesn't deliver bottom-line revenue for me."

IAIN WILLIAM RENWICK: RETAIL EVANGELIST

Title: chief executive, retail stores

Age: 45

Career history: A law graduate, he worked in the consultancy world before joining Storehouse, the then Bhs-to-Habitat retail conglomerate. Marketing director of Habitat from 1992 to 1995. Left to join MTV, where he was also marketing director until 1998, when he joined Imagination, a design agency.

Passions: Gardening, walking, decorating his new house in Italy.