NEW LEASE OF LIFE

The designer Savannah Miller reveals her joy as her sister Sienna announces her engagement – and explains how she’s helping famous friends to rediscover their creativity

- BECKY DONALDSON

The setting is suitably understated: a private dining room at The Princess Royal, a beautifully restored pub in Notting Hill, west London, tucked just behind Westbourne Grove.

Savannah Miller, who is seven months pregnant and hosting a lunch alongside the jewellery designer Dinny Hall, is in high spirits and looking radiant.

The event forms part of Savannah’s Awaken the Maker series, which connects guests for hands-on craft workshops and creative conversations.

As some of the first guests to arrive, we unexpectedly find ourselves helping the fashion designer to fasten the final button of her multicoloured Celia B dress.

It had been delivered just ten minutes before she left home and, given her growing bump, the button proved just out of reach.

“I wanted to wear something jewel-coloured,” she tells us. “I never really wear colour like this, and it feels joyful – it makes you feel happy. How have I not clocked this before? I’m 47 years old!”

Savannah is already a mother to three children – Moses, 21, Lyra, 18, and Bali, 14 – with her first husband, Nick Skinner, a bushcraft teacher from Devon, and has a stepson, Java Skinner, 31.

BABY ON THE WAY

She is now expecting her first child with her second husband, James Whewell, 45, the heir to the Wyresdale Park estate in Lancashire. Their baby is due in a matter of weeks – less than six months after her sister, the actress Sienna Miller, welcomed her third child in May.

“It was intentional on my part,” she says. “I thought: ‘If she’s doing it again, at least I won’t be in the trenches on my own. I’ll join her... if I should be so lucky.’”