The late Mr David Hicks was, without question, the most famous interior decorator of the 1960s, as well as one of the decade’s most arresting personalities. Born in Essex in 1929, he launched his career by redecorating his mother’s house in London in 1954, going on to garner much press attention for his daring use of bright, clashing hues, combinations of modern and antique furniture, and intuitive appreciation of geometric pattern.

If his work was disarmingly colourful, his life was more so: charming, handsome and tempestuous, he was an inveterate socialite, officially joining the ranks of high society when he married Lady Pamela Mountbatten in 1960. His friends, clients and admirers included everyone from game-changing hairdresser Mr Vidal Sassoon to movie star Ms Grace Kelly, which meant that, in addition to launching a hugely successful line of geometric patterned carpets (such as the one covering the floor of the Overlook Hotel in Mr Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film The Shining) and a range of books that are now collector’s items, he lived his life out in the press.

This is plain to see in new book David Hicks: Scrapbooks, a compendium of the designer’s collaged scrapbooks of his own clippings, newly edited, photographed and colour-collected by his son, the architect and interior designer Mr Ashley Hicks. As the eldest son of the family, Mr Hicks the younger would often spend hours with his father, talking through these scrapbooks, which would also be shown to guests and interviewers when they visited the designer in his Oxfordshire home. Below, he talks to MR PORTER about his father’s ebullient, overwhelming and undeniably glamorous legacy.

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**Why do you think your father was drawn to scrapbooking? **

Well, it was a thing. I mean it was a thing. And you know he started all these in 1960. Yeah. But before he’d had a lot of sketchbooks and little collages – you know, more informal scrapbooks. But it was a big thing then. His parents were of a generation, late Victorian, in which everybody did scrapbooks. Generally, people didn’t have their own cameras. Basically, you would buy photographs. You would go on holiday and you'd have photographs taken of you. And then collect souvenirs, postcards and whatever, and you’d put together scrapbooks. If you flip through these, though, it is 80 per cent his own press. They’re press-cutting albums, not photograph albums.

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In that sense, it’s not so much an artist’s scrapbook as a story of a life...

Well, yes, in Cecil Beaton’s scrapbooks, there are about 10 Beaton pictures and the rest are just things he’s pulled out a magazine. Whereas this… there’s nothing. Nothing. There's a couple of spreads at the beginning of other people’s houses. But after that it’s entirely me, me, me, me, me.

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Do you think you took quite a lot of glee from his press cuttings?

Oh yes, it was the aim of his life! It was literally the aim of his life. The rationale behind most of his work was to get the maximum photographs and the maximum number of publications in order to fill up the maximum number of scrapbooks. It literally was – when he had a new client, the new client would say, “I loved what you did for so-and-so, I loved that off-white dining room, I’d like something exactly like that.” And he said, “Well, you can’t! To start with, because I did it for her, but of course you would want to have your own personality expressed in your dining room!” But what he actually meant was… well, if it’s the same thing again, the magazines won’t publish it! I’ve got to have a different room. And every room within a job had to be quite different.

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**So many people do that for themselves now, on Instagram. Everyone's their own press department. **

Well, I grew up with that. So, you know, it’s always been a thing for me. I used to get home from day school when I was six or seven and find that the bloody photographer or stylist from America had rearranged my cars… my toy cars, which I had lined up! And he had made them into a spiral on the table in my bedroom for the photograph. I was furious! I used to spend my whole time hanging out with the photographers. At one stage, I suppose around 1970, he had a sort of in-house photographer who was just at home the whole time.

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**Why do you think your father’s work is so resonant at the moment? **

I don’t know that it is resonating especially well at the moment. I mean it is doing very well at the moment, but it was also doing very well 10 years ago when Tom Ford took some inspiration from it for his Gucci collection. It's been a continuous thing. I suppose that was 15 years ago or something now. Do you remember the opening shot of Zoolander? And he’s covered in a geometric Y design? That’s all Tom’s version of David Hicks. I think the secret to it is that it is completely timeless really. He was very, very careful to avoid anything that was too modern. There’s always something old in the room. So if it's a completely modern room, there are these geometric motifs which are old. I mean that design, the Y design, is a Chinese design from 4000 BC. They’re totally timeless, those things. But he also had a very clean look. He was always about simplifying. The exact opposite of me – I just shove everything in and make it more and more complicated, so it just becomes a mess. But he liked to have things very simple, very memorable, very photogenic. It's an aesthetic that goes back to 17th-century ways of decorating, where they would use the same fabric for everything in the room. Which he then brought back in the 1960s. He was doing the same thing in a bedroom. He’d make the curtains and the walls and the bed and the bed curtains and the sofa all out of one fabric.

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**Is your eclecticism a reaction to that? **

We’re fundamentally completely different. Someone would say to him, “What should I do with this room?” And he would tell them immediately. Just immediately. He’d be like, “Turquoise walls, obviously. Then a white sofa, some orange piping.” He just described the finished room. And actually, if you did decorate it that way that he just sat there and described it, off the top of his head, it would look pretty good. But I mean there might be a million other ways you could do it. And he hadn't really thought about it. It might be a bit hellish to live in in a way, but it would look amazing.

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