Everyone is in a tizzy because Rihanna is late.
Poised with their cosmetic weapons of mass construction, the assembled hairdressers and stylists exchange significant looks.
There's usually only one reason in the pampered world of show business why a star shows up late. Delusions of divadom, right?
Wrong, in Rihanna's case.
Rihanna who has shot to superstardom after her number one summer hit 'Umbrella'
A 19-year-old vision of baby-faced beauty with opulent lips, cute dimples and green eyes hobbles into the studio with a cast on her right foot and a blanket over her shoulders.
She's feeling the cold on an overcast day in London, and she broke her toe by stubbing it against a heavy chair – but she doesn't let the plaster cramp her style, defiantly displaying dark-burgundy toenail varnish.
Yet it's a salutary reminder that the teenage pop/soul singer from Barbados, who has become known as the Bajan Beyoncé, is only human after all, despite what sometimes seems like a superhuman story of success so far.
She has sung from an early age, encouraged by her maternal grandmother Carla, who said it was in her blood.
"I had big dreams," she says simply.
"The neighbours used to complain a lot about how loud I was singing, but I didn't care."
And she has certainly proved to be destiny's child – in the right place at the right time to fulfil her dreams.
During our long, wet summer, we were all singing along to Rihanna's hit "Umbrella", which stayed at the top of the singles chart for ten weeks and beat Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love Yo" as the longest-running UK number one by a female artist.
Rihanna has discovered her inner ‘bad girl’
The song had been offered to Mary J Blige at first, but Rihanna launched a rival bid to record it as soon as she heard its West Indian lilt.
"I was like, “No! This has to be my song,”" she laughs, recalling how she cornered one of the songwriters at the Grammy awards and "demanded" the chance. And in the accompanying video, let's just say her witty striptease-style dance did for umbrellas what Gypsy Rose Lee did for feathers.
No wonder it was viewed more than nine million times on YouTube.
As for her fantastically minxy performance in black leather on the video for her last single "Shut Up and Drive", it even stopped the dreary treadmill exercisers in their tracks at my local gym recently as they paused to gawp in awe. No wonder she's become such a precious commodity that her legs are insured for a million dollars by the Gillette razor company Venus Breeze, one of her many sponsors.
Yet she's smart enough to keep things in focus, telling me, "I had a life before my record deal."
That life included winning a beauty contest at 15, a surprise move for a tomboy who wanted to show the lads how tough she was by joining the local cadets and reaching the rank of corporal.
"I kind of laughed at these stupid pageants," she says flippantly.
"But my friends at school dared me to do it, and my military training came in handy for learning to balance books on my head for the catwalk."
It was the start of a glamorous new direction in her life.
That same year Rihanna was discovered by the American songwriter/producer Evan Rogers, when he and his Bajan-born wife were holidaying in Barbados. "A friend of mine knew his wife and introduced me to them because I was singing all the time at school," explains Rihanna.
So impressed was Evan by her rendition of Destiny's Child's "Emotions" and Mariah Carey's "Hero@ that he flew her to New York, accompanied by her accountant mother Monica, to cut a demo in 2004.
That won her a six-album deal in 2005 with the Def Jam label, run by hip-hop star Jay-Z (Beyoncé's fiancé and a guest rapper on "Umbrella"). Rihanna's first single, "Pon De Replay", reached number two in the UK charts; her debut album, Music of the Sun, sold more than two million copies, and her second album, A Girl Like Me, went platinum and cleaned up at the Mobos in London.
Now she lives in a Los Angeles apartment with a pool and assistants to attend to her every need, and Justin Timberlake has written one of the tracks, "Rehab", on her third and latest album, Good Girl Gone Bad.
"I was so starstruck at being in the same room as him," she says. It has been an amazingly busy two years for the 19-year-old.
It's easy to forget how young she is.
She was born Robyn Rihanna Fenty in February 1988, and seems just like a kid again as she hugs her rug to herself and giggles when I compare her to the thumb-sucking Linus with his blanket in the Peanuts cartoons.
Yet there's also, in the dignified way she expresses herself, a self-protective formality that shows the determined focus of a girl from a broken family who had to grow up quickly.
"My mother raised me with certain standards, to be as grown-up as possible and become an independent young lady.
"Growing up as the only girl, you end up becoming like a second mother," explains Rihanna, who has two younger brothers, Rorrey, 17, and Rajad, 11.
"My parents divorced when I was 16, although they had separated on numerous occasions before that.
"But I've always seen a lot of my father Ronald, and some of my most memorable childhood experiences were with him," she adds.
"He taught me how to swim, fish and ride; he's the one who made me tough and prepared me for the world."
Which makes him sound like the perfect dad, but, in fact, Ronald had developed an addiction to crack cocaine that eventually ended his marriage to Monica and split up the family.
As if her musical heroines Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston weren't warning enough about the dangers of drugs, Rihanna experienced the havoc they can wreak as a child when she saw her father disappearing to the bathroom to feed his habit.
No wonder she has grown up so quickly.
"I had seen the marijuana and cocaine around him but I didn't know what it was," she recalls.
"I just knew that my mum didn't like it, and they were always fighting about it. My mother was a very strong woman and tried to shelter us from as much as she could.
"But she was working, and he was at home, so there was only so much that she could hide from us."
In the end Monica laid down an ultimatum.
"He's OK, he's drug-free now. He got over it a while ago because my mother wouldn't let us go and see him otherwise. So he gave it up for us" explains Rihanna.
After such a dramatic childhood, you can hardly blame the girl for having some fun at last.
And the latest album's sexy cover photograph, of Rihanna in undulating pose like a beautiful python, shows her new confidence.
"I felt I was embarking on a whole new image, a whole new journey. I wanted to differentiate myself from the past.
"I have come into my own and I know what I'm doing now," she explains.
"I've called the new album Good Girl Gone Bad because I was determined to do it my way, I was sick of listening to what everyone else wanted.
"This is the way I like to look and sound, so I became very rebellious – that's the attitude of the entire project."
The foxy new look hasn't gone down well with everyone back home in Barbados, as she's the first to admit.
Despite its laid-back air, the Caribbean is still a God-fearing, church-going part of the world.
"Very proper and conservative," she says.
"And some older people there, who tend to be very judgmental, are not pleased with my new image. But I'm not bad in a godless way," says Rihanna, who thanks God, along with family and friends, on her latest album.
And she doesn't intend to become a victim in a demanding industry that subjects its stars to temptation.
"I don't want those problems," says Rihanna firmly when I raise the subject of Amy and Whitney.
"Even they didn't want that to happen to them, and it's a very sad situation. Outside the business, it's easy to criticise them.
"It's not hard for that kind of problem to happen, but you have to have good people around you to make sure it doesn't.
"Artists work so hard and the people around them keep pushing, forgetting they're human.
"And in turn the artist also forgets she's human and stops caring – and that's when you get lonely.
"If you travel the world and start to zone out in your hotel room, you turn to different things for comfort."
And she's not too proud to admit that she misses the Caribbean lifestyle. "I live on my own in LA and at first my mother was a little concerned because she gets worried about my health.
"When I'm not working, I love just lying on my patio, listening to the breeze. It reminds me of the Caribbean.
"I'm travelling so much, but there's nowhere like home. Sometimes I get so lonely, and it's frustrating.
"Most of the time I'm in a different time zone to everyone else when I call them up – but then I'm a citizen of the world now," she reminds herself in her grown-up way.
She pauses and then concludes: "To have recorded “Umbrella”, which became such a huge hit, and to make three albums in under two years – I had none of this in my dreams when I was a child.
"All I wanted to do was to make music all over the world."
• Good Girl Gone Bad is out now on Def Jam Records
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