New home for Stella

Stella McCartney is to move from Notting Hill to a more exclusive neighbourhood - Belgravia.

The Gucci designer, who is soon to marry her partner Alasdhair Willis, is looking to buy a colossal £7 million five-storey town house.

Friends say she also wants to build another open-air shower in its roof garden - identical to the one she has at her present £1.5 million Notting Hill home.

McCartney is said to want the larger home to start a family with Willis, who she met in Majorca last November.

Sources close to the 30-year-old - the daughter of former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney and his late wife Linda - say that she has also been concerned about security after her friends Kate Moss and Madonna were recently burgled.

The new house is close to one of the proposed locations for McCartney's first London fashion store on Sloane Street. It is also near to the homes of Baroness Thatcher, Joan Collins, Roger Moore and Lord Lloyd-Webber.

The property boasts a huge studio, where she will be able to work.

Willis, 31, is said to have asked the designer to marry him the day after leaving his high-profile job as publisher of the fashionable lifestyle magazine Wallpaper*. Friends say she accepted "gleefully" and that the couple are besotted with each other.

McCartney was reported as saying her relationship with Mr Willis is "a dream", adding: "I have never felt like this in a relationship before.

"We are having the best time just doing ordinary things, you know things that couples do. And it's just fantastic."

She is said to have wanted to settle down and start her own family after realising that most of her friends are expecting babies.

In June she hosted a baby shower for pregnant friends Sadie Frost, Kate Moss and Sharleen Spiteri.

At the party, McCartney denied recent reports she has fallen out with Heather Mills, her father's new wife, whom she is widely reported to despise.

She said: "The family is fine. Reports have been wildly inaccurate. There is no feud and I will be celebrating my father's 60th birthday as any daughter would."