SOPHIE HICKS ARCHITECTS

In 1998, she transformed a derelict house in London’s Kensington district into a multicolored store for Paul Smith, where children were invited to ride tricycles. Four years later, at the request of Phoebe Philo, then creative director of Chloé, she designed boutiques with plywood-covered walls, defying the idea that luxury must rely on expensive materials. Are display windows essential? In 2008, she covered those of Yohji Yamamoto with white Japanese paper.

“In reality, I always work the same way,” she explains. “I ask questions—thousands of questions—to the CEO, the communications team, marketing, the workshop. I want to understand everything. Just like in a private project, where I ask the client if they cook, entertain, work from home—and then adapt the space accordingly.” For Max Mara, she immersed herself in the archives, held long discussions with Ian Griffiths, the discreet artistic director who has worked there for nearly four decades, and visited the Collezione Maramotti museum in Reggio Emilia, owned by the founding family.

She is delighted to present, as a counterpoint to the orange staircase, a retro backlit linen screen broadcasting live weather conditions from the Emilia-Romagna region—cloud cover, humidity, heat—all reflected in the Avenue Montaigne space. It’s unlikely customers will recognize the Italian climate, but that isn’t the point. What matters is a certain taste—Sophie Hicks’s taste: a minimalist, conceptual aesthetic without being cold, appreciated by connoisseurs.

She favors raw materials, fence planks, metal, restrained environments where the colors of abstract artworks burst forth, and trompe-l’œil effects—like the additions to the building’s concrete columns that double as shelves. She doesn’t just dislike fire detectors; she also has a distaste for LED lighting (which she covers with tape when visiting sites) and coffee tables (“I’m allergic to them, because as soon as you have one, you feel compelled to put something on it”). She points to a table made of pinkish copper and smiles, as if uttering a swear word: “It’s camel—but not on acid. On another drug, I’m not sure which. We played with the bad taste of that color. You need a little vulgarity.”

Her own path, however, is anything but vulgar. Barely out of adolescence, she began working for London magazines as a stylist, collaborating with renowned photographers on fashion shoots. At the time, the magazine press was at its peak, with budgets rivaling film productions. London in the 1980s was buzzing, and like others whose names still resonate in fashion circles (Amanda Harlech, Isabella Blow…), she brought her generation’s inventiveness to prestigious publications such as Tatler, eventually working at Vogue—sometimes arriving at the office in pajamas.