Hooked on Hicks in Paris

It is no secret that I am a huge fan of David Hicks. As most of you know there has seen a resurgence in the Hicks style, and his electric colours and bold interiors are making a comeback. The revival in part can be attributed to Christophe Aboville the brand’s artistic director.

The David Hicks France boutique opened in 1973 on Rue de Tourmon, just across the street from the first Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche boutique. Recently (well in 2010) the boutique underwent a renovation. Gone was the fashionable neutral palette of the safe 90’s, to be replaced with the David Hicks' signature hot pink, bright orange and brilliant red colorations. The boutique’s interior, coming straight from the psychedelic combines colors, geometric shapes, antique furniture and contemporary style. Chic while different from the conformist standards the Hicks style reigns supreme.

Thanks to Aboville, the David Hicks line of carpeting, wallpaper, furniture and objects are lovingly edited and recreated, from the original and are now available at the boutique.

A recent commission in Paris is the below apartment. It's unusual to see this amount of color in a Boulevard Haussmann apartment, which is most often a study in muted tones, however it works brilliantly.

”My greatest contribution as an interior designer has been to show people how to use bold color mixtures, how to use patterned carpets, how to light rooms and how to mix old with new,” –David Hicks on Living — with Taste (1968)

David Who?

Over the last decade or so interior design has never been more popular! Countless magazines and television shows showcase what we can do to our humble abodes to make them worthy of any magazine shoot. Celebrity interior designers are a dime a dozen. However to me there is only one designer who is king, with a couple of others who are only mere consorts. And this one really did have a royal connection, married to the Duke of Edinburgh’s first cousin. And of course we are all familiar with his daughter India, who was also an attendant at the wedding of Prince Charles and the Lady Diana Spencer.

David Nightingale Hicks the superstar interior decorator and designer, famous for his employment of bold, shockingly vibrant colours, for mixing antique and modern furnishings and contemporary art for his famous clientele had all the Savoir Faire in the world. With a middle name such as Nightingale one would have to! Also married to Lady Pamela Mountbatten the younger daughter of the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma and cousin of the Duke of Edinburgh the die was set to become the interior decorator by which all others are judged. His relentlessly organized, color-clashing home interiors were the acme of jet-set chic in the 1960's.

Known for his love of graphic color combinations as well as a temperament that veered between disarming charm and apoplectic rage, he moved through the circles of the rich and famous with aplomb.

His career as designer-decorator was launched to media-acclaim in 1954 when the British magazine House & Garden featured the London house he decorated, for his mother, and himself when at the time he was drawing cereal boxes for an advertising firm.
With Peter Evans a restaurateur he initiated a sparkling explosion of drama, colour and excitement in London by designing, building and decorating the Peter Evans Eating Houses, a restaurant chain in London's 'hot' spots of King's Road, Chelsea, Kensington Church Street, and Soho. The style epitomized the Swinging Sixties of London.

Peter Evans: "Hicks was without a doubt a genius. He would walk into the most shambolic of spaces that I had decided would be a restaurant, a pub or a nightclub and, lighting up a cigarette, would be out of the place within ten minutes, having decided what atmosphere it would generate because of what it would look like. He always got it spot on."

David Hicks' heady combination of bold antiques and modern furniture set off by abstract paintings, often best deployed within an envelope of cool Georgian architecture, was the last word among movers and shakers of the 1960's, like the beauty products tycoon Vidal Sassoon. For the American cosmetics diva Helena Rubenstein, he designed an infamous living room of purple tweed walls and Victorian furniture upholstered in magenta leather.

Royal commissions also came through his family connections and he made carpets for Windsor Castle and decorated the Prince of Wales's first apartment at Buckingham Palace.
If Hicks could not find a particular fabric, carpet or wallpaper he started designing his own. This and his hyper-dynamic colour sense formed the basis of a style which is much admired and copied.

In the 70's and 80's David Hicks shops opened in fifteen countries around the world. He designed, for example, guestrooms at the Okura Hotel in Tokyo and the yacht of the King of Saudi Arabia. It is said that if he couldn't find something he designed and made it.

Typically, and eccentrically, David Hicks even designed his own coffin, in which he 'lay in state', according to his precise instructions, in the ground-floor room of his gothic garden pavilion.

''He killed every flower in his soul,'' said Min Hogg, editor of the trend-setting British magazine The World of Interiors, referring to the designer's hatred of chintz. ''His was a rigorous, very tailored look. So much of it was about control. There wasn't a wrinkle or crease anywhere.''

''My greatest contribution as an interior designer has been to show people how to use bold color mixtures, how to use patterned carpets, how to light rooms and how to mix old with new,'' he wrote in ''David Hicks on Living -- with Taste'' (1968), one of nine practical design books bearing his byline.

Helena Rubinstein & David Hicks, a Match Made in Heaven

What would a blog about savoir faire be without the meeting of two of my most favourite style icons? Helena Rubinstein, one who had enough savoir faire for 10 of us and David Hicks, interior designer extraordinaire who showed us what living with savoir faire was all about. So put these two together and what do you have? A match made in heaven whose offspring showcased how brilliant each was. Both were headstrong and had their own ideas on how things should be accomplished.

David Hicks has been considered to be at the forefront of interior designers in the 20th century. However after his marriage in 1960 to Lord Mountbatten’s daughter his career was on the wane. However fortunes changed with a commission from Madame Rubinstein to decorate her new Knightsbridge apartment in London. The result showed that Hicks was at the top of his game and put him back in the limelight. Most major newspapers and magazines ran features of the result, unleashing on an unsuspecting public a masterpiece of bold colour schemes and savoir faire. Hicks managed to incorporate Madame’s compulsive acquisition of objects and art into an intelligent mix of old and new. Vitrines inset into silk coloured walls held Madame’s collections. Radiators were covered in gold mesh that looked like Faberge. Old Portuguese carved wooden doors were used as bedheads, and Victorian furniture was painted white and recoverd in daring colours.

With true savoir faire when Hicks inquired as to what colour she would like the walls of her new drawing room painted, she called for a pair of scissors and proceeded to cut a swatch of purple silk from the lining of the Balenciaga she was wearing. And like a true gentleman, Mr Hicks carried out her wishes, the result being a pink, scarlet and magenta room that Hicks referred to as “one of the most dramatic, and daring colour schemes I have ever assembled”. I don’t have any photos of the finished result, however below are two examples of what the end product would have been like.