After you’ve walked through the secret garden, up the front steps, and past the wicker chairs on the porch, the first thing you see when you enter Nikki Renshaw’s Kits heritage house is a massive Union Jack rug on the floor. Not the conventional flag, the subversive Vivienne Westwood version.

On a bench at the side stands a full-size replica of the Queen’s crown. It’s an “English eccentric home”, same as the name of Renshaw’s new company, the English Eccentric Home.

Copresenter on CFUN’s Nik and Val radio show, the British-born Renshaw may have lived in Vancouver for 11 years, but the house she shares with husband Christopher and daughter Olivia could have been airlifted straight from the Cotswolds. As we sit at her huge wooden kitchen table, its backdrop a massive pine Welsh dresser crammed with blue-and-white chinaware, Renshaw pours tea into Peach Petal cups dating back to the 1930s and takes me down the road that led to making one-of-a-kind cushions.

“I had a lovely old black beaded sweater I’d worn to death,” she says. “The sleeves were all ripped and torn. I thought, ‘It’d make a good cushion.’ ” Next, raiding her collection of vintage nightdresses, she found one in black silk—and a business idea. Recasting elderly cardigans as cushions is also in tune with “the whole recycling thing”, she says. With catwalk trends often moving to home interiors, she thought, “Why not do this literally?”

Renshaw taps the mother lode for materials. Across the pond, her mom scoops up comfy cardis and ships them over, ensuring that they meet her daughter’s requirement of 100 percent woolliness. “When my mum sends me a box, it’s like Christmas,” says Renshaw, who dry-cleans the sweaters, then cuts them out, positioning the scissors to take advantage of the characteristic fine ribbing.

She’s not finished yet. On go the adornments: a silk frill, and buttons found on eBay, snipped off otherwise “horrid” sweaters, or bought at Button Button (422 West Cordova Street). The final touch is a detachable brooch. “My mum raided her geriatric friends’ jewellery boxes,” Renshaw says. The result evokes the England of a kinder, gentler era: “That faded country-house thing where everything is a bit shabby.”

Conjuring misty parklands, a world where both tables and manners are well polished, a tea-rose-coloured cushion has a pearl-grey silk ruffle and a matching asymmetrical vertical stripe with pink antique glass buttons running down it. Pinned to it is a silver-and-pearl brooch. Another in softest blue cashmere is teamed with ivory silk, flower-shaped mother-of-pearl buttons, and a brooch in peacock blue 1940s rhinestones.

Renshaw is strong on gender equality. “I thought, ‘If I’m going to do a girlie line, I have to do a bloke line,’ ” she says. Hence Chaps cushions made from Burberry, Christian Dior, and other vintage jackets, the label stitched to the jacket’s lining, which is used as backing. The front of one Masterpiece Theatre–ish number in red-and-black-checked oatmeal tweed features a button, a pocket flap, and a seam that sends the check’s straight lines intriguingly askew. Its lining is buff-and-olive paisley, its label Richards of Hong Kong, and its trim a manly frill in the same tweed.

“The girlie ones are perfect for a bedroom or nursery, but this is ‘very library’,” Renshaw says. (She points out that if you have a sweater or jacket you can’t bear to get rid of, she also makes custom keepsake cushions.)

Renshaw says her style is not the “shabby chic” trademarked by fellow Brit Rachel Ashwell, but more “faded glamour”. “I’m very influenced by that whole Miss Marple world,” she says. “That country-house palette. This look is completely timeless.”

The zeitgeist is moving her way, Renshaw feels, citing the emerging tea culture and recent articles on real English eccentrics in magazines like Vanity Fair. Designers like Lulu Guinness, Vivienne Westwood, and John Galliano epitomize that English eccentric look.

She’s not stopping at cushions. She also imports and sells 1930s eiderdowns ($300 to $500), which are available—like the cushions ($150)—at Lisette (2308 West Broadway), besides other props that conjure up the country house. “Five old red books and a teacup, and you have a vignette,” says Renshaw. For Valentine’s Day, she will assemble retro picnic hampers for two.

You can also find the cushions at Belly & Beyond (4118 Main Street) and Secret Garden Tea Company (5559 West Boulevard), and the whole line at www.theenglisheccentrichome.com/.

“I’m thinking I have to do tea cozies, toast racks—things that have disappeared that we need,” Renshaw says. “There used to be some pomp and circumstance in my life. I want to bring it back.” Just so long as it’s the real thing. “I hate anything repro,” she says, tongue-in-cheekily. “It’s the suburbia of decorating.”