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"I never sit in a chair, choose a fabric, admire or criticize my family's clothes, without being intensely aware of what I'm looking at,\" said David Hicks. \"Dedication to design means ruthless criticism and losing friends.\" Even so, clients, friends and family adored him.\n\nHicks, who was based in London, dominated international design in the sixties and seventies; his projects were so numerous because if he found something hideous, he would redesign it himself. That led not only to houses, hotels and restaurants but also to carpets, furniture, gardens, shoes, a nightclub and even a hairstyle.\n\nHaving tossed out the timid English habit of treating stately houses as havens of safe, good taste, Hicks introduced clashing colors, geometrically patterned carpets, large-scale objects arranged in small spaces and compositions of curios and artworks, which he called tablescapes. Strong architectural elements and symmetry were important to him, and he pioneered a particular brand of eclecticism, mixing the finest antiques with the best modern pieces\u2014Chippendale with chrome, Louis XV furniture with violet glove-leather upholstery.\n\nThe son of a stockbroker, Hicks was born in 1929 in Coggeshall, Essex. He was always interested in art, and his career in interiors began in 1954, after a house he designed for his mother was published in British House &amp;amp; Garden. Suddenly London's most stylish people were at Hicks's door. He was handsome, charming and always rattling off ideas, but after his marriage to Lady Pamela Mountbatten, there were sultans, kings and rock stars waiting for Hicks's designs. (Jackie Kennedy told him that the only way she survived her first night in the White House, which she called \"that morgue,\" was by borrowing some Hicks bedside tables from her sister to cheer herself up.)\n\nOne of his favorite projects was the Palladian-style Vila Verde, on the Portuguese coast, because he chose the site and designed the architecture, the garden, the furniture, even the doorknobs.\n\nIn his later years it was architecture that interested him most\u2014in particular the landscape architecture of the garden he was creating for his own house, The Grove, in Oxfordshire. Near the end of his life, Hicks even meticulously planned his own funeral, designed the coffin\u2014to be filled with his obituary notices\u2014and dictated the dress code and which royals should be invited. He died on March 29, 1998."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/hicks-article-012000>