Hicks family feud as baby is banished to the Harry Potter closet
BECOMING a stepmother is often difficult, but it’s proving particularly challenging for fashionista Kata de Solis, who is married to Prince Philip’s godson, Ashley Hicks.
Aged 35, Kata is only ten years older than Hicks’s elder daughter, Angelica, and she has revealed the pair are struggling to bond.
‘I get on with the younger one [Ambrosia, 20], but not the older one,’ Kata discloses at a party in Mayfair. ‘She lives in New York and I think that’s better for us, because we don’t see each other that often.’
In January, Kata is due to give birth to her first child with interior designer Hicks, 54, who is Prince Charles’s second cousin. His two daughters are from his previous marriage, to fashion designer Allegra Hicks, 56. He and Kata are struggling to decide where their baby boy, to be called Caspian, will sleep. ‘The nursery is currently in an actual closet,’ Kata tells me. ‘It’s not too far off from Harry Potter under the stairs. ‘There are only two free rooms, one being the closet, which is the smallest room, and one being the studio, which is the largest, but we didn’t want to have problems with the stepchildren. ‘If we gave Caspian the largest room in the house, they wouldn’t be happy, even though they don’t live with us.
They’re already not super-thrilled about the kid.
‘One of them in particular [Angelica, pictured left with her mother] has a say on everything.
‘We can’t lie about what room we put Caspian in because, at some point, Ashley will put a picture of it on Instagram and the older one will freak out.’
Kata adds: ‘I don’t know if they’ll even meet their stepbrother. The older one has been telling jokes around London about me. She jokingly said there aren’t enough stairs in our house to push me down.’ Perhaps a sign of trouble ahead was when Angelica shoved Kata’s face into her cake during high jinks at the couple’s wedding in 2015.
Kata and Ashley met through the photo-sharing website Instagram.
Ashley’s mother is Lady Pamela Hicks, daughter of the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and Kata says: ‘ She hasn’t given me any parenting tips because she wasn’t a very hands-on mother. She just told me to hire a good nanny. I won’t take that approach myself.’