Interior designer Fran Hickman
Fran Hickman gets easily bugged by stuff. Returning from holiday, she had trouble settling back into work before she realised what the problem was. A pile of books someone had left behind her chair. Once they were back on the shelf, calm was restored. That holiday, incidentally, was hand luggage only. Fran Hickman holidays always are.
“I pack very lightly,” the 34-year-old says. “It’s so much easier when you don’t have too much stuff. I don’t want it around me. It’s a responsibility, keeping it, maintaining it.” She acknowledges the issue. “It is ironic, given what I do.”
Hickman is an interior designer in great demand. She has been described as the “socialite staging a monumental takeover in London”. The daughter of Kensington Estates property developer John Hickman, she worked for the Soho House Group then Colefax and Fowler before setting up her own studio in 2014. Though the above description might suggest otherwise, Hickman isn’t a minimalist. It’s more that every project has to stand on its own merits and everything has to be in its right place.
For the Chess Club, a private members’ club in Mayfair run by chef Jackson Boxer that opened last year, she complemented the restaurant’s burnt orange dining chairs and sunshine yellow Kvadrat textile banquettes with 257 butterfly bookplates, inspired by a holiday in Tuscany, where she visited the apartment of the late Italian architect and designer Carlo Mollino. The effect was simultaneously fantastical and homely — and dissimilar to any members’ club you’ve ever visited. Which was the point. Unlike many of her contemporaries, there is no signature Hickman style.
“We’ll never do anything else with butterflies,” Hickman says. “What’s so great about my job is it’s so varied, it’s such a tapestry of styles and periods and clients that we get to play with. I’d get bored if I did the same thing every time.”
Current commissions for Hickman’s practice include a Farfetch store in Tokyo, a Richard Meier-designed building in New York and half a dozen other projects in London.
“Fran has a rare gift, to layer exquisite colour, texture and detail into a small space with such judicious care that it feels gorgeous and intimate, rather than busy and overworked,” says Jackson Boxer.
Hickman’s work to date has been described as having a “masculine cool” edge — we don’t feature many interior designers in Esquire, we’re not World of Interiors — and it’s something she doesn’t deny, but she doesn’t really confirm either.
“I’ve done a couple of ladies’ ready-to-wear shops where I’ve employed pink carefully, finding the right shade so it’s not too strong or sickly sweet. I love the language of colour. But I’ve also done quite a few bachelor pads where you’ve got to think about the materials. I don’t just mean textiles. There’s a different language to working with men and women.
“I’m not about to put a pink room in a bachelor pad.” franhickman.com
Winning touch How Fran Hickman > became London’s most in-demand interior designer. By Johnny Davis