'In order to be irreplaceable, one must always be different,’ said Coco Chanel. David Hicks (1929–98) was certainly both — a highly creative dynamo with a unique talent, who cut a distinctive figure, even in the rarefied world of interior design in the last half of the 20th century. His deft skill for bravely furnishing classic spaces with lively colours and bold patterns, his fabrics and books, had a lasting impact on British taste.
At the outset of his career, Hicks made a conscious decision to plough his own furrow, diverging dramatically from disciples of John Fowler, of whom he commented ‘he had the country-house look all sewn up’. He was exposed early in life to a broad range of aesthetic influences; the chapel designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott at Charterhouse School, Surrey, which he attended until the age of 16; the elegant sitting room of the priest’s lodgings at the Grosvenor Chapel on South Audley Street, London (where his mother rented a room when he was studying set design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts); the lavish interior of No 5, Belgrave Square, the London home of the politician and author Sir Henry ‘Chips’ Channon; and the Palladian villas of the Veneto in Italy, which he visited when was freed from National Service in 1951.
Having learnt the rules, Hicks set out to break them. His masterstroke was injecting touches of modernism; although his interiors rested on the firm footing of robust classic principles, they remained unburdened by historicism. Unable to find fabrics and carpets in large-scale, graphic patterns (many hexagonal) and vibrant colour combinations, he designed his own and they became a trademark of his style that was in demand worldwide, including the USA and Saudi Arabia, where he furnished King Fahd’s yacht, Prince Abdulaziz.
Back home, Hicks decorated the London houses of Mary Lee Epling, the wife of Douglas Fairbanks Jnr, and Mrs Rex Benson, former wife of Condé Nast. He also designed the Buckingham Palace apartment of the then Prince of Wales — proving to be an inspired and highly progressive choice.
Hicks’s rigorous architectural style extended to the garden he created at the Oxfordshire home he shared with his wife, Pamela, daughter of Lord and Lady Mountbatten of Burma, where he insisted on painting the swimming pool black because he considered the more popular option of blue to be ‘vulgar’.
He firmly believed in a visual coherence between inside and out, ensuring that flowers were out of view. ‘What will never have space in my garden are herbaceous borders. When I plant flowers, they are never seen from the house and will only be used as cut flowers.’ He preferred the strong profile of topiary in a linear design and has been referred to as ‘a straight-line gardener’.