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The Story Behind David Hicks's Iconic Designs

by Rick Anderson

It all started at Britwell House, designer David Hicks ’s country place in Oxfordshire. “He carpeted his bathroom in a Chinese pattern with interlocking Ys, which he found in Owen Jones’s The Grammar of Ornament,” explains Ashley Hicks of his father, who showed the world in the early 1960s that carpeting, of all things, could have a wild side. No one was making patterned floor coverings—at least not to the elder Hicks’s ultramod standards—so he had some whipped up by artisans in the north of England, where narrow, antique looms produced swaths of Brussels weave that could be stitched together to fit a room’s measurements.

Soon Hicks was creating colorful confections for Windsor Castle and the Prince of Wales. The latter, a cousin by marriage, commissioned an octagonal number in royal blue with Welsh red dragons for his first apartment in Buckingham Palace. As American decorator Billy Baldwin put it, Hicks “revolutionized the floors of the world with his small-patterned and striped carpeting.”

Decades later, the Brit’s hallmark hexagonal design infiltrated pop culture: A scaled-up version paved the hotel halls in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Another rendition covered the floors chez Sid, the kid-villain of Toy Story. As for the fashionable set, it still adores all things Hicksian.

“I had a saved search on eBay for anything vintage Hicks,” admits writer Amanda Brooks , who designed her son’s room around an original blue-and-white carpet she snagged at auction.

Now Hicks the younger, an architect and designer, has partnered with Stark to reproduce his father’s designs. But not without a few lively additions of his own—some of which, a mischievous Ashley says, “he would not approve of at all.” starkcarpeom

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