For an intimate dinner on the terrace, India Hicks chose handpainted china and dressed the table with wild flowers, shells and votive candles.
India Hicks was in Richmond in May to talk about tablescapes, entertaining, a little philanthropy and her island style at the “What a Wonderful World” spring 2024 benefit for Little Hands Virginia. The event, held at The Jefferson Hotel, featured inspired table settings designed by more than 30 Richmond-based decorators.
“[It’s been said that] ‘Tablescapes’ was a term invented or coined by my father. I’ve no idea if that’s true, but let’s go with it. My dad invented it,” Hicks says. “Of course, when David Hicks talks about a tablescape, it’s not what we’re thinking [today].”
She explains that, in her father’s perspective — her father being David Hicks, the iconic British decorator who took the design world by storm in the late 1950s — a tablescape was a carefully curated presentation of a collection of disparate objects unified by color, theme or material.
“[My father] was an extraordinary designer. He really set the drawing rooms of England alight with his designs. He was extraordinary. … He mixed old with new. He brought geometrics in. He was not afraid of color. He would mix puce and purples and vermillion and oranges and scarlets all together, and we would say, ‘Wow! Wow!’ We said, ‘Clashing colors.’ He said they were never clashing. Only ever vibrating.”
Her father, Hicks says, decorated and designed everything around him, including his wife’s hair. Hicks’ mother, Lady Pamela Mountbatten Hicks, was the daughter of Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy to India, and served as lady-in-waiting to her cousin Queen Elizabeth II. A style icon herself, the author of four books and a textile and leather goods designer, India Hicks is also involved in humanitarian relief efforts, working with the Global Empowerment Mission in the Bahamas and Ukraine and as a patron for the Prince’s Trust.
In her new coffee table book, “Island Style,” she shares a look at the interiors of Hibiscus Hill, the home she shares with her husband, David Flint Wood, and their five children on Harbour Island in the Bahamas. Entertaining, she says, is a large part of island life, and while it can be challenging to create tablescapes for parties in a place where resources for party favors are nonexistent, it’s fun to get creative with her events.
To keep things interesting, she says, she’ll often stage a party in an unexpected location on their property. One night, she might opt for serving cocktails on the dock; on another, she might stage a family dinner in the garage. Mixing up the locations and the guests as much as she mixes up the decorations, Hicks is always relying on local flora and fauna — such as palm fronds, shells, lucky nuts and wildflowers — for table decoration.
Hicks also recounts that, over cocktails at Hibiscus Hill, the designer Tory Burch, an avowed David Hicks fan, once said that it was refreshing to see a home “under-decorated.” Hicks says she and Flint Wood decided to explore that idea further. Finding that both their “island life [style] and decorating sensibility were a combination of our traditional British and our richly flavored Caribbean present, all mixed up with our own eccentricities.”
