Bill Gates, one of the world's richest men, has taken a stake in Carpetright, the laminate flooring and carpet specialist run by Lord Harris of Peckham.

Cascade Investment LLC, the personal investment company of the Microsoft billionaire, bought a 3 per cent shareholding in the business last week.

The purchase price is thought to be little more than £15 million. Mr Gates is worth $58 billion (£29 billion) - enough to buy the whole business 50 times over.

Shares in Carpetright rose nearly 3 percent, or 19p to 781p yesterday, surprising traders worried about the effects of the consumer downturn on the company.

The move is the latest in a number of deals by Mr Gates in the UK over the past decade. Ten years ago he joined a group of American investors that bought Cliveden, the stately home in Berkshire associated with the Profumo scandal of the Sixties. Cliveden is now a luxury hotel. The billionaire last year teamed up with Prince Al-Waleed, the Saudi investor, to buy the Four Seasons Hotel group.

While far less glamorous, the investment in Carpetright is in line with other more mundane deals carried out by Cascade.

It owns stakes in a Mexican brewery, the Canadian National Railway and PlanetOut, a media and entertainment business centred on the gay and lesbian market.

Cascade was unavailable for comment yesterday while Carpetright said it refused to comment on individual shareholders. The timing of the investment in Carpetright is likely to renew speculation over the immediate future of the business.

The credit crunch forced Lord Harris, Carpetright's colourful founder and chief executive, to scrap plans for an £800 million buyout in December.

He wanted to take the business private to speed up its expansion in the UK and overseas.

At the time Lord Harris said: “Every six weeks I have to think about what I'm saying to the City in six weeks' time.”

Lord Harris floated the business in 1996 but began his retail career at the age of 15, when he inherited a market stall and two shops in South East London. He founded Carpetright in 1988. The Carpetright empire consists of nearly 600 stores across Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Poland.

Mr Gates joins David Herro, the US fund manager who in the 1990s helped to oust Lord Saatchi from the advertising group he founded, on the retailer's shareholder register.

UK companies have attracted other billionaire US investors. Warren Buffett, the world's richest man, invested in Tesco, the super-market group, but last year railed against the City's disclosure rules that force investors to show their hands when a stake crosses the 3 per cent threshold. “Disclosure is always a problem because, when you make it public, people jump in and the share price goes up,” he said.

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