Out of the closet: Tamara Mellon

Tamara Mellon, 34, is the multimillionaire managing director of Jimmy Choo. So I am slightly taken aback when she opens the door to her grand Belgravia apartment in a tracksuit and bare feet (OK, it's a fashionable, dusty brown Juicy Couture velvet tracksuit, but still).

But then again, she has just had her bedroom carpeted in deeppile cream wool and, more importantly, only gave birth to her first child, Araminta, five months ago. Tamara's large blue eyes are redrimmed from a 4am wake-up call. 'She insisted on playing,' she groans.

Reassuringly, her walk-in wardrobe is just as you would expect - it is all shoes. Three hundred pairs, she says. Her summer sandals occupy eight shelves of her wardrobe. A towering pile of dark purple shoe boxes contains her winter collection, which is uniformly high-heeled and black. And 10ft above our heads, only accessible with a ladder, are 15 pairs of knee-high black boots, and several dozen plastic boxes, through which the silhouettes of yet more strappy sandals are dimly visible.

Naturally, all this footwear (except for a single pair of Nikes) is from Jimmy Choo, where the humblest sandal starts at £250, making this collection worth some £100,000.

Tamara, however, gets all these shoes free. She is part-owner of the label so coveted by Hollywood's A-list that the makeshift Jimmy Choo outlet on the fifth floor of the Peninsula Hotel, Beverly Hills, is always the busiest place in LA the night before the Oscars, mobbed by actresses matching stilettos to designer dresses (the pre-Oscar stall was a visionary idea that has since been copied by a whole host of other retailers). J-Lo, Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz, Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Elizabeth Hurley and Gwyneth Paltrow are all aficionados; Halle Berry wore chocolate-coloured Choos to accept her Best Actress Oscar this year, and Sex and the City devoted an entire episode to Carrie's hunt for the perfect pair.

Since Araminta's birth, Tamara has found that, although she's back to her pre-pregnancy size eight, she doesn't feel like wearing some of her more outrageous outfits. A daring black, backless Versace dress that plunges to the navel and comes with a red and orange jewelled belt slung around the hips has fallen from favour. 'I just can't imagine wearing this ever again,' she says, looking at it with something approaching amazement. 'I've only kept it because I thought it might be good if I want to go to a fancy-dress party as a belly dancer. It just feels inappropriate now I have a baby.'

That doesn't mean, of course, that her wardrobe isn't absolutely crammed to bursting. Fourteen pairs of designer jeans, all perfectly pressed, hang colour-coded next to a dozen pairs of dark trousers. Dresses, skirts, shirts and jackets all have their own dedicated compartments. 'I try to keep it neat,' she explains, 'or I'd never find anything again.'

This winter, Tamara has gone for a mix of pink and black: a pink velvet suit, and a pink strapless sheath, both by Matthew Williamson; a beautiful Alexander McQueen pink wool and chiffon dress at £950; and two McQueen LBDs, as well as a sumptuous black £2,575 Yves Saint Laurent beribboned 'cage' dress and a gypsy-sleeved blouse from the same design house that she wears with velvet pedal pushers. 'I always overspend on clothes,' she says. And she can afford it. Aside from her personal fortune, she is married to Matthew Mellon, the scion of one of America's most illustrious banking and oil families. As such, Tamara is the perfect couture customer - she has the svelte figure and the kind of impeccable grooming that is more Fifth Avenue than King's Road; she has the lifestyle (she got married at Blenheim Palace, she holidays on Valentino's yacht); and, of course, most importantly, she has the budget.

But accessories remain her passion. Aside from the shoes, she has a chest of drawers stuffed with dozens of Fendi bags. 'It doesn't matter what you're wearing - if you have good shoes and a good bag, you'll always look right,' she says.

Tamara's awe-inspiring array of shoes isn't just for pleasure. She is personally involved in the designs, 'It's vital the shoes are comfortable. I test every new model to make sure.' Her innovations include extra padding under the ball of the foot, 'That's where it burns when you've been standing for ages. Male shoe designers just don't know these things.' It works. Some Choos might be perilously high, but they are strangely comfortable.

Tamara first encountered the Malaysian cobbler Jimmy Choo in 1995, when he was making shoes by hand in a Hackney garage and she was accessories editor at Vogue. Realising there was a gap in the market for glamorous shoes for the under-forties (the ladies who lunch were already catered for by Manolo Blahnik), she persuaded Choo to go into business.

Last year, Choo himself was bought out for a multimillion-pound sum by Equinox Luxury Holdings. There are now eight shops in Britain and America, but Tamara is aiming for 25. And by that time, she'll no doubt need a whole new walk-in wardrobe to accommodate all the extra work she will be bringing home with her.