It’s November, the sun has returned, days are longer and for the last few days, the wind has been pumping. Yes, it’s early summer in Cape Town.
Each season we are all breathless for what the fashionistas will prescribe as the overwhelmingly popular look for interiors and exteriors for the season. This season it feels like a lot of tropical, Bahama-inspired chillaxing. Inspired, in part no doubt, by the very popular series Blood Line set in the Florida Keys (if you haven’t watched this series yet on Netflix you simply must immediately!).
Huge palm trees and even huger white balconies and verandahs that you can imagine drinking homemade lemonade on abound, and so it was that one late Friday afternoon I met India hicks via a rather lovely client of mine. I was lying on the couch when she came into my life – it was late Friday- more evening than afternoon, and i wasn’t particularly well dressed, which is embarrassing when meeting an heir to the British throne. She’s 678th in line so I guess I can chill out a bit about that. Anyhoo, there it was. “Do you know India Hicks?” my client asked. Indi who? was my inane response and then there she was in all her Bahamian glory with the breathlessly chic yet relaxed home and easy-breezy southern style that you gotta love, staring out at me from the pages of google as if to say “how could you have not known about me. Shame on you” Shame on me indeed…
As Interiors Online put it “There’s no disputing the pedigree of British-born designer India Hicks. Daughter of interior designer David Nightingale Hicks, she was a bridesmaid for Princess Diana and Prince Charles, an international fashion model, and developed luxury fragrances and product lines for Crabtree and Evelyn. With three published interior design books inspired by her island lifestyle in the Bahamas, India Hicks is also a well-respected designer. With a relaxed coastal-chic style that blends her tropical island lifestyle with colonial elements, India incorporates soft natural materials of paper, wood, and straw with muted tones for a calming effect. She layers eccentric objects, pictures, and momentos to create a layered, liveable home that encompasses a definite British flavour with a strong sense of individuality.”
And then, as we do, I started searching through my locations for homes that exude a similar sensibility and elements of the style. Immediately I knew I had my very own India Hicks in the form of my BFF. As leggy as India, as helplessly, yet casually stylish and her beautiful home in Stanford – Country Life. Roz creates little pockets of interest all over the house that have me oohing and aahing as i walk around. A flair, no a talent inherited from her darling mom, she has created a space so extraordinary and yet so unfussy and so impossibly stylish.
Other beautiful properties on our books that exude this sensibility are:
Image refs:
Bungalow blue interiors
Interiors online
Shoot my House
Perfect Hideaway
