India Hicks, designer, humanitarian, and mother of five, has always lived a well-designed, globe-trotting life. At 55, her pace and focus has shifted, she says, but life is all the sweeter for it.
“I think growing up under the imposing eye of David Hicks, who was one of the world’s most dynamic designers, certainly of the 1960s and 1970s, gave me passion for design,” Hicks said. “Design surrounded us everywhere.”
David Hicks, known for his bold use of colors and juxtaposition of styles, designed everything from his wife Lady Pamela Mountbatten’s hairstyle to the beautiful set-like interiors in the home, to the White House bowling alley, to King Charles’s first set of apartments in Buckingham Palace, to small cottages on farm estates and locations featured prominently in film and media.
“So his breadth of design was vast,” Hicks said. “And although I was never formally trained in interior design or design itself, I lived and breathed it from the moment I was born.
“My father was very bold with the way he expressed himself and the way he expressed himself in design. I’m a lot less so.”
It was in the Bahamas that Hicks found her style, and her home.
The Jewel of the Bahamas
In childhood, Hicks spent big family gatherings for Easters on the remote Windermere Island in the Bahamas, in a home that David Hicks modeled after an Egyptian mausoleum and built the year Hicks was born.“I think when I landed on this tiny speck of an island that I live on now, Harbor Island, which is considered the jewel of the crown of the Bahamas, I was very inspired by the freedom and the nature that was so abundant,” Hicks said. “I always credit Mother Nature because she’s always full of amazing ideas, from the fish in the ocean to the flora and fauna.”
“Really, it is extraordinary how one can be so inspired by the environment you’re in.”
Had she lived in the city, her designs would have evolved quite differently, she said. As it is, Hicks leans toward natural fabrics and color schemes, creating comfortable spaces and pieces.
“I design homes that are very easy to live in, and we try to take out the harsher elements and bring in the softer elements of wood and paper and straw, in fabrics, or in colors,” she said.
Hicks and her husband, David Flint Wood, met as children and reconnected as adults through friends and family on Harbor Island.
“We both fell in love with a way of life and an island and a country,” she said.
“I’m now 55, which I’m always surprised about.”
It comes with quite a bit more squinting and forgetting where the keys are, she said.
“All of that comes with a very peaceful confidence about who I am, what I want, the kind of fabric of my life that I’ve created,” she said.
Global Missions
In September 2019, Hurricane Dorian swept through the Bahamas and devastated two islands neighboring Hicks’s home. She got involved with several organizations that provided relief, and Global Empowerment Mission stood out to her.“They’re in there after the immediate disaster, but then they stay on the ground and empower teams on the ground, so it’s countryman helping countryman,” Hicks said.
After the hurricane, the nonprofit provided battery packs, places to stay, mattresses, computers, phone calls, and oft-forgotten feminine hygiene products, but then the next step was building a school, Hick’s recalled. The organization realized that the children needed normalcy and stability, so it set about building a hurricane shelter school building.
“I think it’s a very impressive way of managing disaster relief. It’s not just immediate; it’s long term,” Hicks said.
At the time of this interview, Hicks was soon due to set off on her fourth trip to Ukraine since the Russian invasion, with the Global Empowerment Mission teams
“I work with the agency out there bringing awareness and aid funding. I’m a tiny, tiny, tiny part of a very enormous team, but it’s important to me when I was invited to join the executive board, that I wasn’t just going to be there in name, I wanted to actually be boots on the ground. I wanted to be doing something useful. I wanted to understand how the foundation worked. I wanted to understand what the teams were going through,” she said.
When you’re there, you feel the world shake from the explosions and hear missiles overhead, and it is deeply humbling, Hicks shared. There is ever-present danger and you witness the worst of humanity in war, but also the best of humanity in how people care for each other, she said.
“There are these depths of misery, and yet these highlights of hope,” she said.
With Hicks’s social media platform and reach, she has focused on matching donors with those in need; for instance, a family whose home has been obliterated and who would need $75,000 to begin rebuilding.
“It’s been very effective, and you can get quite significant donations,” said Hicks, who has also reached out to big brands such as Ralph Lauren and Uniqlo and other foundations to bring in necessities.
Leaving these trips brings about a different sort of emotional roller coaster than entering the disaster zones.
“The sense of guilt is huge,” Hicks said.
It’s a long and arduous journey in and out of Ukraine, and when she leaves, she’s extremely cognizant of the fact that she can leave and has a home in a free country to return to.
“I think for your family and for your life, you’ve got to be able to, in a way, compartmentalize that and just carry on, because some of the sights and sounds and stories that we see and hear when we’re there are so horrific,” she said.
Hicks tries not to let the darkness linger in her psyche.
“I always think that I’m getting stronger after each trip,” she said, sharing that on her most recent trip out, she thought she had dealt with everything quite well and hadn’t gotten overly emotional.
“I felt quite balanced. And then I was on the plane and the air hostess came down the aisle, and she had a cardboard box, and in it, she was handing out ice creams to everybody. And just that simple fact of her reaching into her box and handing me something obviously triggered all of the emotion that I had been carrying with me from that trip. I just started sobbing. I started absolutely sobbing, and the poor air hostess was obviously very confused. It was the same action that I had been doing for the past two weeks out there, where you’re handing a cardboard box and in it are all the necessities for somebody to live off for the next month. And I think when I saw the air hostess do that, it was an absolute trigger point for me.”
However, being a mom of five is grounding for Hicks.
Small Joys
“I have a very busy life and love to live life to its absolute fullest, and sometimes, to my own detriment, I take on too many projects and I’m always rushing in fifth gear, even though I live somewhere that’s really idling and probably in third gear. But I do love to fill the unforgiving moment, and I find that very inspiring.“I get a natural adrenaline rush from having to start the day very early in my office before anybody else in the house is up, with the windows open and listening to birds, to ending quite late at night with a walk down our drive and a full moon, and looking at the stars with my three dogs just before I go to bed.
“In all of that, I travel a great deal for work for the philanthropic projects that I’m involved with; for my five children, who are spread across the world; to see my mother, who I’m very close with. I am careful to make sure that in the quite hectic schedule that I maintain, I have an hour to myself where I can run or I can do yoga, or I can go for a swim, or I’m walking in a city, or I go to a gym and a hotel.
“And for me, that hour now, it’s not even so much as kind of the body maintenance, it’s more mind maintenance, and I’m actually finding that is the hour where I try not to take my phone with me, where I’m not answering calls. You do find that for most of the time, everything can wait. It’s just an hour. It can wait. But I find that hour is very important. And then it gives me the energy and it gives me the clear mind to then tackle whatever comes next.”
These days, joy is everywhere to be found if one looks for it, she said.
“It may be that a flight leaves on time! And I’m so happy that I’ve made my connection. Maybe just seeing my three dogs asleep together on the sofa, just that little moment brings me such enormous pleasure. It’s not the bigger things that it used to be in any way, it’s not signing a big contract for designing a new collection of linen. It is much more [something such as] seeing that the grass has been mowed or that the flowers are blooming, which sounds terribly old and boring. And you know what, it might be because I am, creepingly, terribly old and boring. But it does make life simple and so lovely.”
Hicks still works on many design collaborations, but these days, humanitarian causes are the center of her work, and many of the collaborations serve those causes, too.
“I feel lucky that I’ve been able to make the time in my life to do that now, and also work for the Prince’s Trust, which has just launched in America,” Hicks said.
The Prince’s Trust was started by King Charles III, who’s Hicks’s godfather, with his severance pay from the Navy in 1976.
“And now, a million young people’s lives have been dramatically changed because of this foundation, because of the forward-thinking of our present-day King,” Hicks said.
The stories that program participants have shared have deeply moved her, from mentoring to realizing a business vision, to giving someone the confidence to leave an abusive relationship.
Not long ago, Hicks worked with Tusting, a family-run artisanal leather bag maker, to design bags in support of the Prince’s Trust. A portion of sales from her second collaboration with shoe designer Penelope Chilvers went toward the Prince’s Trust’s programs.
“I’m so blessed to still be able to have my hand in the design world, as well as being able to balance that with working for two big charitable foundations,” Hicks said.
