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Designer and entrepreneur India Hicks sat down with Indagare CEO and Founder Melissa Biggs Bradley during our Design Club series to talk about her latest projects and design inspirations, island living during Covid and why creating your own unique sense of place (and setting a proper table) still matter.There is something entirely infectious about the energy of India Hicks that comes through even on Zoom. She has an uncanny ability to command the room, even through a screen. Instantly likable, high-energy, self-deprecating, generous, humorous, India is what someone’s grandmother might have called a “live wire.” She’s capable of filling in both sides of a conversation (if necessary), and she has lots of ideas—and she’s going to tell you about them all, in one sitting, if possible. No doubt she’d make a fabulous dinner partner. In short, like her newest book, An Entertaining Story, India is highly...entertaining. This week, the designer and entrepreneur confessed to Indagare’s Design Club, a small group of like-minded travelers in the Indagare community who meet each month with leading designers and tastemakers, that she finds it a little ironic that the book she launched during Covid is about entertaining, a subject that has become taboo: “There was a moment of panic for me and I thought...I've launched the book at really the worst time ever….Actually, I found that an awful lot of people were sitting at home and they wanted a moment of escapism...so I was very lucky.” It was also a little ironic that, during most of the past 10 months, she found herself at home on Harbour Island in the Bahamas, surrounded by her partner and five children constantly—“I’m really a terrible cook,” she explains. But all of that extra cooking, the messy kitchen, the unpacking and reloading of dishwashers, the unmatched socks and untidy rooms helped inspire her most recent project: This past Sunday she launched India Hicks Home, a lovely micro collection of table linens she designed and is distributing through Kentucky-based company Pomegranate Inc. (available for purchase, here). Designing a tabletop collection during Covid was perhaps just the antidote she needed—an expression of her creative, entrepreneurial side, especially given the shuttering of her lifestyle brand last year. “I thought, wouldn't it be nice to do a small and limited-run collection of linens that could be hand-blocked in India in partnership with Pomegranate. We've done it very limited because I wanted to be considerate of where the world is, and it's nice to feel that there's something that's affordable, and yet it still feels quite special.” The collection comprises three styles of table linens (napkins, placemats and runners) that can be combined together. For the first run she wanted to keep it simple, with just two color schemes of chocolate brown and carnation red. She designed it, she explains, “to be mixed and mingled haphazardly on the table, because I felt that was kind of how we were eating as a family during this time of Covid—we're all very different kinds of characters and we do all mix and mingle rather haphazardly around the table, so I wanted a collection that didn't feel precious.” The designs themselves are also personal, in part inspired by her walks to the beach and the sea with her 13-year-old daughter Domino (“Sea Ferns & Domino”). Another, “Carnations,” incorporates a bold red floral print drawn from her father (and interior designer) David Hicks’s graphic carnation design—which was inspired by the flower his father wore in his buttonhole daily. The third, “Palm Avenue,” incorporates the avenue of trees her longtime partner, David Flint Wood, planted when they first moved into their house 25 years ago. “The majestic avenue of palm trees shows our family's history, and we do entertain down there quite a lot.”
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