Are you a Notting Hillbilly? Or, perhaps, a Shoreditch Ironist?

Bling Billionaire

London's the place for global billionaire entrepreneurs - people from all over, people who've made a lot of money very fast and want you to know it. They want the biggest houses with the biggest frontages, because their style's anything but discreet and anonymous. The houses they buy are either 19th-century Robber Baron villas built by their Victorian counterparts (Kensington Palace Gardens or Melbury Road - Michael Winner's house would do nicely but it'd need blinging up a bit), or they go for that weird mid-20th- century kind of lashup that estate agents always call "ambassadorial". Think oversized Kentucky Fried Georgian in Bishop's Avenue, Highgate.

Global billionaires could be Russian Oligarchs, Turkish undie manufacturers or Indian software moguls, but they all tend to have an aesthetic in common. Bling Billionaire is very like Dictator Style (the Marcos and Mobutu look) and cousin to the Haut-Crim Look - the New Jersey Mafia style. This aesthetic means having everything seriously over-scale. Like that house in Citizen Kane- it's all much too big, Charlie.

The look is marble everywhere, massive blazing chandeliers, and gold leaf on every possible surface. It's brand new silk carpets and vaguely Louis-the hotel repro French furniture (Bling Billionaires think real antiques look, well, old).

Considerations of comfort, discreet stealth-wealth, irony or political correctness simply don't cut it in this world. The key themes are "Wotalotigot","I could-buy-you-one-thousand times - over" and sometimes, faintly scenting the air,"I could have you minced up in the foundations of a new shopping centre and no one would say a word". The parodic version of Bling Billionaire style is Rapper, with its furs and cars and Cristal and bitches. But Rapper is actually too fast and clever for the serious Bling world, which is really High Victorian with added broadband, plasmas, piped music and underground swimming pools with seriously gash plaster Corinthian columns. Plus, of course, a million's worth of stateof-the-art security systems.

Shoreditch Ironic

Shoreditch Ironists are adorable. They look like latter-day Jarvis Cockers - and that's just the girls. The original core dates back to the people who settled in the Shoreditch/Hackney/Hoxton area of east London, or the Northern Quarter in Manchester, when they were opening up in the Nineties. But wherever there's an art-school- educated contingent that's gone into music and styling youthorientated advertising, you get ironic interiors. If you're an artschool and fast-track twenty-or thirtysomething, you're so soaked in media and contemporary art ideas that everything in your place has a story, a reference and a clever joke to go with it.

In these inner-city areas people live in unlikely places - former Electricity Board buildings and deconsecrated council flats or above curry houses - but they have more money and prospects than you'd think. It's a world where Design Originality counts for more than comfort or elegance or conventional status-indicators. So all the usual reassuring decoration options are forbidden. Sleek matchy- matchy is unthinkable - and unaffordable. Comfortable carpets are out unless they're ironic nylon bathroom shagpile at pounds 5 a yard from Allied. Flamboyant retro is OK as long as it's obviously naff - so a flea-market Frenchy curly-wurly sofa covered in a purply rayon damask is allowed. And demotic devotionals are allowed too, provided they're safely that bit dated - blow-ups of the Spice Girls or Take That rather than Beyonc.

If your place is a sort of living laboratory for Channel 4 set decoration you don't want to over-invest in expensive fixtures anyway. I knew a made-it artist who panelled one side of his former clothing-factory loft in smart, film-set-like MDF, with a mock- heroic chimneypiece. But he left the other side of the room as it was, bare brick walls, metal windows, exposed pipes and ducts, with an enormous blow-up of Miriam Karlin and Sheila Hancock in their roles from the 1960s TV sitcom The Rag Trade. Keeping the faith.

Notting Hillbilly

Notting Hillbilly women, like their sisters in Primrose Hill and the smarter suburbs of big cities around Britain, definitely play it down. And that means their houses too. They're nice-looking, good bones, forever thirtysomething upper-middle-class girls, usually with a bit of inherited money and nice things - and decent media salaries, too. But they're still not in the luxury league of the banker or pop star next door. And so they don't attempt to fix up their houses like them, either. They won't have gutted the place like their City neighbours with their under-floor heated limestone and stainless-steel glass box kitchen, or their salvaged pounds 450- a-squaremetre Versailles parquet in the drawing room.

The Hillbillies' houses are artless, whimsical, a bit modern but a bit countrified too, with more than a whiff of their other place in Norfolk or Gloucestershire (what Rachel Johnson calls "Poshtershire"in her brilliant new novel Notting Hell).