Furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, carpeting and sculptures: your talent certainly is multifaceted. Yet you started out as an art and design student. Can you mention a few of your favourite artists and designers in history?
AH: That’s a long, long list. So many Renaissance heroes, among them Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Mantegna, Giulio Romano; architects like Borromini, Vanbrugh, Robert Adam, Ledoux and Sir John Soane; artists like Blake, Fuseli (master of the erotic hairstyle!) Sickert and Vuillard. I’m completely obsessed - and, I have to confess, very much less interested in people working today, which is not something one should ever admit!
Your father David Hicks is acknowledged as one of the most important interior designers of the late twentieth century. Did you ever feel overwhelmed by such an extraordinary legacy?
AH: Not exactly overwhelmed but he’s of course always been a huge presence in my life, only scarcely less so since his death 19 years ago. I worked for him briefly and rather unsatisfactorily, which didn’t really help. As a child I was very much ‘taught’ by him - to look at everything with a critical and interested eye, to learn historical styles and origins (in museums and collections as well as architectural periods) and to draw. I remember clearly his attempts at teaching me perspective, on a yacht in Greece, and how to draw trees, in a field in England. Since he died I’ve bolstered his reputation as much as I can, and exploited his legacy through ‘David Hicks by Ashley Hicks’ collections of wallpaper, fabric and carpet, while at the same time creating interiors and products in a style very much my own and determinedly opposed to his. I like to make comfortable, relaxing, complex interiors that are quiet suggestions of mood; his rooms were typically bold, formal, graphic and simple exercises in achieving a perfect photogenic interior. At the end of the day, I like to do things that would annoy him, but I’m still the first to recognise that he was an absolute genius.
Which are the projects in your career that you are particularly proud of?
AH: The most recent, usually. Like the ones I have made for Fuorisalone, Milan, in collaboration with Cabana magazine: a group of my ‘Mini-Totem’ sculptures in bright Renaissance colours for the panelled living room of a Renaissance house, the Casa degli Atellani; and a room setting featuring Corian objects I designed - obelisks and a desk - with a ‘faux collector’s cabinet’ (my own photos of museum treasures made up into a faux display case, printed with overlaid reflections of Versailles) and a pair of canvas screens that I painted with giant tulips ‘en grisaille’.
What do you think of top-notch designers that collaborate with mass-market brands?
AH: I happily consider partnerships with high, middle and low-end brands. Considering isn’t committing, but I’m convinced there’s space for all kinds of product in the same portfolio and the same design hand can be employed on both the most luxurious and the most simple collections without harming either. The depth and quality of craftsmanship, the value of materials used and, of course, the quantity produced all differentiate very clearly the different price-points and distribution so that none will compromise the others.