David Hicks

Gray is the yin and yang altogether. It's the feminine in the way it nurtures and supports surrounding colors. It's also the masculine, an ominous sky and battleships. In the tonal palette it represents Switzerland: Neutral, cool, subdued, sophisticated, elegant, corporate, and serious.

In the right hands it is grace, as in the designs of David Hicks (the two below) which are nothing like corporate.

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Gray socializes well with other colors. It is a peacemaker. It pulls back bright colors and grounds darks and lights. It's most agreeable: In a family of purple, pink, and yellow it is a kind of visual middle child.

It's the epitome of diversity and the ultimate equalizer. It is also bold without being assertive. An abused gray can easily turn into a drone: drab, dull, and dead. Yet within it is always the potential for the spectacular.

It is simple, understated elegance, refined enough to never call attention to itself.

In the garden, it stands back and launches the green and red forward.

It makes even a hand-made look natural in the landscape.

Black needs no surrogate or replacement; there is no new black. The old one is still doing just fine.

Our relationship with black as a medium goes back at least 35,000 years. Many of the primordial art materials were black — soot, charcoal, pitch, asphaltum — and were most likely associated with ritual and special occasions. Because of this, no color is as heavy with significance. Black was associated with authority, priests, and royals. It was also the dark of night, the void, the beginning and the end. It would come to symbolize death, mourning, evil, magic, and no doubt because of all of the above, sex.

Black would be integral to cultures around the world. The earliest uses of black in manufacturing that can be dated include Korean and Chinese lacquering and pottery around 700 -800 BCE. A short time later it would also be found in Greece and the Americas.

Below: Black-figure Neck Amphora, 6th century BCE.

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
``Beauty is truth, truth beauty,''--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
John Keats, Ode to a Grecian Urn

While black was the color of power it also symbolized submission. Priests don black to demonstrate their submission to God.

Black was also favored by vampires and witches for implications of evil. It also gives the wearer the appearance of being thinner which for many of us may be the opposite of evil.

Boulders suspended in a sea of high gloss black walls.

Black is the complete absorption of all colors and the absence of light. It is those properties that make black, along with yellow, the most visible. (The reason why it's used on street signage.)

Robert Longo prints and Queen Anne chairs direct the otherwise subtle tones of the wallpaper and flooring.

An old school remix with Adolf Loos:

And David Hicks:

Interior designer Billy Baldwin's blend of classicism and modernism is described with a Louis XV chair and a Chinese table framed in black with flashes of gold. His ca. '50s Slipper chair is in the foreground.

The Interior designer that the New Yorker once called the presiding grande dame of West Coast interior design and erstwhile Playboy Playmate, Kelly Wearstler, channels some serious David Hicks mojo in her use of black, above and below.

Storied designer Nicky Haslam channels his own version of Dorothy Draper mojo:

The entrance to the Avenfield House, Park Lane, London:

For this British home, Haslam turns up the aristocratic swank. Shiny and glittering surfaces bounce a little harder given the undertones of black.

The white linens on this bed designed by Loyd Ray Taylor and Charles Paxton Gremillion, Jr. bursts into the room's stark black.

The cabinet gives a touch of black to add drama:

Black deftly provides some cold yin to the room's otherwise white hot yang.

Some things are just better played loud, like an electric guitar.

Such is also the case with the work of British designer David Nightingale Hicks. His work is not for the timid. His use of color is strikingly bold, his motifs pulse with the heart of a giant, and his decors practically hum with manic energy. And yet, for all his optical vitality, his rooms still retain a sense of depth, space, and a kind of virtuosic harmony. Usually when we say harmony the implication is a kind of quietude, a relaxed state of being that happens when all fits into its place. Hicks's work reveals that there's so much more to it than that.

Any self-respecting designer should've no trouble making an impact with with red and gold;

but to go white with undiminished effect takes a singularly deft eye.

Or how about a bold purple room done with impeccable taste?

Or similar bold executions achieved in a limitless series of colored iterations:

As was noted in an earlier post on the history of interior design, Dorothy Draper, et al, early greats of design balanced their artistic sensibilities and ambitions with rosters of A-list of friends. David Hicks was no exception. (His first breakout project was the redecoration of his mother's house. And, by the way, his daughter's godfather was Prince Charles.) Yet, for all the blue blood tint in Hicks's social sphere, it's hard to imagine him toning down a project to pander to a client. If there's one thing apparent in a Hicks project, it'd be its utter lack of compromise.

Committees don't produce work like this:

Hicks was also known for his prodigious ability in the quick study. He could enter a room, light a cigarette, and decide within ten minutes what the aesthetic solution would be. You can imagine his difficulty in explaining the concept above. Eventually he'd just have to say, "trust me." It'll be brilliant. And he'd be right.

Shiny and velvety and round: Imagine another room featuring twin beds that's as completely sexy as this.

Hicks takes it outside.

Below are images of one of the most famous gardens in the world you've never seen: Hicks's private gardens at his home in Oxfordshire, The Grove.

Hicks mixes the traditional with whatever his fancy conjured; A description that'd probably describe all his work. History hammered into something beautiful and new.

If you haven't already seen part 1, it's here.

Old and Bold: Above, Dorothy Draper's New York's Essex Hotel from 1954; Still brazen after all these years.

Interior Decoration may be design's oldest profession. Before there was a room, there was the tomb: Tomb construction goes back to the megalithic period, and cave painting even further. But it wasn't until well into the Industrial Revolution that interior design would be considered the legitimate industry it is now. With the help of the era's version of New Media — magazines — design could be mass marketed to middle class worker bees, a demographic who'd never had such access before. A cause forwarded by publications like Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful, and Ladies Home Journal, and others which all began near the end of the nineteenth century.

(Draper's Greenbrier Hotel, WV, above. Her Victorian Writing Room on the premises was once called The most photgraphed room in the United States.)

By the 'teens of the last century, the nascent industry was already minting its first superstars. Their names were Dorothy Draper, Syrie Maugham, Sybil Colefax, Elsie de Wolfe, Ruby Ross Wood, Rose Cumming, and Sister Parish (with her partner Albert Hadley). They would be women (mostly), born of wealth, blue of blood, and with design credentials often overshadowed by their status as socialites. Their client list — Astor, Vanderbilt, Kennedy, Roosevelt, Vreeland, Warhol, Jackie O, various Royals and other A-listers — would be impressive, and their influence, indelible. Interestingly, you'll find none of their names in Architectural Digest's "The 20 Greatest Designers of All Time." Maybe fashion is to blame; for most of the aforementioned, their work is wildly out of it. Maybe it's their use of chintzes, metallic wallpapers, paisleys, fabric by the truckload, and a musty classical grandiosity burlesqued too many years by too many lesser talents. Those who survived into the sixties would also live to see Minimalism torture their particular brand of high-style.

Designer egghead, theorist, Polosky Prize winner, and author John Pile (one of his definitive sourcebooks above) makes the point that "interior design is a field with unclear boundaries in which construction, architecture, furniture, decoration, technology, and product design all overlap."

With that in mind, The Evidence:

It's been argued that Dorothy Draper is the Mother of all interior designers (besides being Design Editor at Good Housekeeping and author of the classic Decorating Is Fun!). It was she who started the first interior design firm and was the first to "professionalize" the craft. (Though, according to the New Yorker this honor belongs to Elsie de Wolfe.) Whether she was first it seems clear its Draper's work that has left the more lasting legacy. Called the Martha Stewart of her time, she not only established herself in the otherwise female-unfriendly industry of construction, there was that best selling book and she was, from the 30s to the 60s, the most famous interior designer in the world. She was one of the first designers to use eclecticism authentically and not simply as a boast of an over-stamped passport. She is also the only interior designer, man or woman, to be honored with a retrospective at a major museum (starting with the Museum of the City of New York and traveling on).

Another Draper work: This from the Hotel Quitandinha in Ipanema, Brazil. Compare this to her contemporary, Elsie de Wolfe:

De Wolfe's work, while literate and fluent, was still very much a part of the Victorian age that was her time. Draper's style, often referred to as "mischevious," takes the Victorian motif as a starting point. She electrocutes it with color. She exaggerates the forms and modernizes them with affection and humor. And the impact of her work continues.

Two designers to be impacted by the Draper style were American Billy Baldwin and Brit David Hicks.

Billy Baldwin, called the dean of indigenous decorators by Architectural Digest — he hated the term interior designer (and just to note: another designer, Benjamin Baldwin, was similarly called the dean of American interior designers), may be best known for his treatment of Diana Vreeland's Park Avenue apartment. Her instructions to the designer: "I want this place to look like a garden, but a garden in Hell." Eclectic gone wild with exotic flourishes and few strokes of orientalism was his answer. (For a guy who said "the best way to decorate a room is to simplify" this must've been way outside his comfort zone.)  The room has an almost pummeling energy and dynamism which makes Draper's bold work practically understated by comparison. Baldwin takes Draper and spins it into something else, which, as we know, is what great creatives will do.

The design of David Hicks (above) came to symbolize the epitome of Swingin' Sixties style. Hicks was infatuated with motifs and geometry and his design, while extremely ordered and disciplined, pulses with anarchic energy and color. Not only could he dress a room, he could dress himself: He was voted Best Dressed Man from the Clothing Manufacturers Federation of UK.

From the Dean of Interior Design to the man Diana Vreeland called the James Dean of decorators: Michael Taylor. If the image above is any indication, his work didn't shrink from the bold. As a colorist, it was subtlety for which he'd be better known. Credited with inventing the California Look, Taylor's style is described as glamorous rustic. His neutral tones and natural textures might appear pale against the aggressive color of the Draper-ists but aggressive color or style would never go mainstream. Enter Michael Taylor: He would change that. His palatte, while subtler and muted, favored tertiary colors to play off the reflective mirrors, chandeliers, and white accents. And natural light: Abundant natural light was his meat.

The result: Whispered elegance and a substantial influence.

Unlike the others above, Taylor was one of Architectural Digest's "20 Greatest Designers of All Time." His supporters are legion. Taylor may also be the one designer who most significantly helped form our contemporary standards of good taste. Yet, in his time he was considered an innovator, an original, and for many he was the best of America's designers.

One design theorist recently spoke of aesthetic sustainability: If there's a yardstick for measuring a designer's greatness, sustainability may be it. With all things considered, for aesthetic adaptability and sustainability the verdict is:

Michael Taylor: World's Greatest Interior Designer.

Next, Part III: Furniture.

Easy to do, considering pink's traditional provenance: Pepto-Bismal, bubblegum, young girls' bedrooms, princess ball gowns, toilet paper, Angelyne, Paris Hilton, Miami Vice, supermarket bouquets, and splayed road kill. To use pink without conjuring any of the above requires certain skill.

Though, in the right hands pink can become the new frontier.

Pink is best when it comes to us as a surprise.

As it veers toward the hotter end of the scale, pink is a color with both hot and cool properties.

Below, something we don't usually associate with pink: Subtlety. It floats lightly over a green jacket and yellowed hair like a cloud at sunset.

Just a lampshade's worth in a white room. Imagine the scene with the colors reversed: A color with the power to go from graceful to Graceland in a stroke.

Below, a pink dream world reflected back in the mirror's image. A physicist might explain this as the optics of mismatched vibrational frequencies, reflected energies, color transmissions or the like. Then again, maybe it's just a radiating hot pink pillowcase. Whatever, the effect is stunning.

The reflected light of the above is recreated to similar effect below through a painting and chair cushions. Bluish shadows on the walls and floor subdue the animal from going alpha.

Below, pink adds drama to a dark palette. Suddenly, there's more Feng Shui and less Pepto-Bismal.

Photo from the David Hicks Archive

Upon returning from a trip to India Gloria Vanderbilt may or may not have said "Pink is the new black."

This, on the other hand, is from Vogue editor Diana Vreeland's 1984 memoir, D.V., weighing in on pink this way:

Actually, pale-pink salmon is the only color I cannot abide. Although, naturally, I adore PINK. I love the pale Persian pinks of the little carnations of Provence, and Schiaparelli's pink, the pink of the Incas. And, though it's so vieux jeu I can hardly bear to repeat it, pink is the navy blue of India.

It appears the culture of India has braved pink for centuries.

Above, in the work of great designer David Hicks (ca. 1970s) pink and bright green joust for the eye.

Above, pink and gray continue their longstanding relationship. Though, here, the pink may be a little hotter and the gray a little warmer.