SOPHIE HICKS ARCHITECTS

With her boyishly short hair and smart men’s clothes, Sophie Hicks is widely known for her sharp personal style. She developed her fashion skills during the nine years she worked as a stylist, first as a teenager for Harpers & Queen, then at Vogue, and afterwards for Azzedine Alaia. It wasn’t until her mid-20s – with a little indirect help from Madonna – that she discovered her true calling: architecture. After a degree from London’s Architectural Association, she went on to design office space, exhibitions, private residences, and shops – for Paul Smith and Chloe, among others. Her most recent project, for Yohji Yamamoto’s Parisian flagship store, is a miraculous exercise in crafted wood and folded paper. Hicks’ style is subtle, quiet, detail-oriented, and elegant. Her spaces are never flashy, but always smart, and often witty. Meeting her in her long, lean mews house home in Notting HiII- which she shares with her boyfriend, children and pets -I found myself impressed by her poise, determination, and sharp intelligence. But the true focus of my envy was her indoor swimming pool.

Emily King: Oh, I’m a big swimmer and I would love an indoor pool like that! How long is it?

Sophie Hicks: It’s twelve-and-a-half meters.

EK: Exactly half the width of an Olympic pool.

SH: Well, actually it’s a few inches too short, but it doesn’t matter.

EK: Do you swim every day?

SH: I try to. But when I go to the country for the weekend I tend to miss a Friday night. But I’m careful not to miss too many other days. But the real reason the pool is here on the ground floor is because this building’s on the mews and people walk right outside the window. If you have the lUxury of space to spread around, you think, “Well, what am I going to do on the ground floor? Do we want to eat there, with everybody watching us having breakfast?” Then you think, “Garage?” But that’s a bit.

EK: … Boring?

SH: Yes. So my main project has been developing a facade design for a building in London, right on the street like this, where you get some light coming in and some views in and out. It should be oblique enough so you feel protected, but the wall would still be light permeable. It would solve the problem of being watched, unless of course you don’t mind that. I mean, in Amsterdam for instance, they all quite like being watched.

EK: The other problem with houses in London – the Victorian ones, at least – is that the raised ground floor is the sitting room. It’s the nicest room in the house, but you never go there because you spend all your time in the basement kitchen.

SH: Yes, which is horrid. It’s much better to live laterally. In a way it would make sense if everybody could sell parts of their houses to their neighbors and chop them horizontally. [Laughs.] While my family and I were waiting for this building to be finished – just after we came back from France -I rented a mansion flat in Holland Park, and it was incredibly nice, just one rambling room after another.

EK: When did you live in France?

SH: When I bought this house with my ex-husband, in 2003, there was a lot of structural work to be done. While working on the Chloe shops, I got used to employing executive architects: there were so many projects there was no way I could do everything by myself, so I’d do all the design and then hand it over to the executive architect for the day-to-day management. When we started working on this house, I thought: “Why don’t I use the architect who did Chloe? I don’t have to stand here and check people putting steelwork in, and setting concrete floors!” Rather than stay in London, renting a big flat that would have cost a fortune, I asked him to manage it all and took off for a year with the kids to Megeve in the French Alps.

EK: Surely your three children rebelled? How old were they then?

SH: Arthur was about 14 then, and he took it quite well. But Edie, who was 12 at the time, said: “Absolutely no way!” But I convinced her by promising to take her horse with us and to drive her to ride every day after school. Olympia, the little one, was fine. She actually loved it. We drove there from England during a boiling hot summer, with a horse trailer, a cat, and five kittens in the car. Every time we stopped something terrible would happen. Once Edie forgot to shut the gate, and the horse escaped. But the journey was actually hilarious fun.

EK: You started working in fashion quite early. I read that you edited the Harpers & Queen “Teenage Issue” in 1977 – you must only have been in your teens yourself!

SH: Yes. It’s funny, I actually just came across that issue the other day. It’s absolutely ghastly, but also quite brilliant in a way. They had a very interesting features editor called Anne Barr. She’d teamed up with the writer Peter York and he came to her with this germ of an idea about a tribe of people that he’d kind of identified, and together they created the “Sloane Ranger.” [“Sloane Ranger” is a 1980s term for a particular breed of wellheeled young Londoner; see the The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook, Ann Barr and Peter York, Ebury, London, 1982].

EK: Had you already found your uniform back then?

SH: I used to always wear a Claude Montana sailor suit. It had a white-linen collar, wide navy blue linen trousers with buttons on the front, and a navy blue linen jacket with gold buttons and turned-back cuffs. It had big shoulder pads, but I took them out. It was quite fabulous and I really loved it. I used to make my mother wash and iron it overnight.

EK: How did you get the money to buy it?

SH: I’d blagged my way into the Montana show in Paris, and I thought, “Ooh yes, I want that!” But I obviously couldn’t afford it. However there was this man Ricky Burns, who had a shop with his mother in George Street. Ricky was an incredibly camp hairdresser-type with a gorgeous bouffant. He had one of the few shops that stocked designer clothes. I remember going in to see him and saying: “I really, really want that sailor suit, and I don’t want you to sell it to anyone else. But I can’t afford it!” And they were amazing: they probably gave it to me for half the price, or something.