"YOU MUST WRITE IT IN THAT WAY," Basia Zarzycka says softly, "in a magical way, because this is not a normal shop."

She's right too. Basia Zarzycka at 52 Sloane Square is much more than just a shop. It is a gallery, a tourist attraction, a Chelsea icon and an installation. If it were entered for the Turner Prize, it would probably win.

Outside, there is a changing display of handmade flowers; a halo around the window, and a permanent invitation to browsers. Inside, there is a sumptuous mix of brightly coloured hats, waistcoats, shoes and accessories, glittering with jewels, coloured glass, precious stones, lace and gold braid. There are flowers everywhere. Look more closely and you will see an opal ring, a diamante eye patch, a tiara. The-place is spellbinding.

So too is Basia. Artist and exhibit, she dresses the shop, her home in south London and herself in the same flamboyant style. When she speaks, she has a perfect English home counties accent. When she laughs, it is a delightful, tinkling sound, high in the register. When she responds to a compliment, she says very precisely, "Thank you very much indeed," and hits every consonant. (This is a woman who could never say "yeh", it would always be "yes", with the sibilant meticulously sounded.) And when one of her employees comes into the basement workshop, holding a hand-made rose and asks a question in Polish, Basia responds in that mellifluous language, with the same delicacy and precision she brings to her spoken English, and to her work. Her story is a romance. Both of her parents were Polish, separated from their own parents in Stalin's purges. Her father grew up in Pakistan, her mother in Siberia. After Stalin, they both tried to find their families - and, working through the Red Cross, disc overed that both fathers had survived and were living in Birmingham. Separately, they made their way to the Midlands where they met, fell in love and married. Basia came along in 1959.

"My father used to paint and taught me from a very early age to keep a sketch book, and to record my thoughts and feelings not only in words but in pictures, and so I was brought up in this way," Basia says. "Both of my parents loved gardening and living in England and our home was very colourful. I loved making things and I was always encouraged to do that."

After school, Basia went to Goldsmith's College in south London, where she studied fashion and textiles, had a fleeting career as a selector for Marks & Spencer in Baker Street, lectured at Winchester School of Art - and then 20 years ago made a complete break, launching her own business the hard way, with a stall at Bermondsey market. "I used to get up at three in the morning," she says, "I was on my stall at five and I used to trade until about one in the afternoon, and I made my living this way.

And then I moved into a little shop, and then I moved into the King's Road into another little shop - and here I am today at 52 Sloane Square. I've done it all myself." What she has done is unique, and not very easy to describe, magically or otherwise. I suggest that if her shop was a city it would have to be Venice, that city of masked balls and intrigue. "Yes," she says. And then she adds an embellishment: it is also very middle European, she explains, with touches of the Baroque and elements of the English garden.

Her style is so very much her own.