March 9, 2023 By David Nash Architectural Digest
“There are some loose rules, which when applied to colour cannot fail,” explained the late interior design legend David Hicks in his 1966 book, David Hicks on Decoration. “They were evolved by American decorators in the immediate postwar period. All reds go together, all pinks go together, just as all blues, greens, yellows, browns, and all [grays] do.” And with these colors—and several others in his repertoire—Hicks designed inspiring and vivid spaces which, in bedrooms, very often included a coordinating well-dressed canopy bed.
“I think he just loved them, and they are a fantastic way to create a real statement in a bedroom,” says designer Ashley Hicks about his father’s penchant for elaborately topped beds. “It can make a small bedroom feel grand, and in a big one it creates a whole other space within the bedroom—I don’t know how often you’ve slept in a canopy bed, but they have a lovely cozy feeling to them.”
He isn’t alone in this thinking. Although the senior Hicks incorporated the style frequently throughout his career—particularly during the ’60s and ’70s—the old-school staple has amassed a contemporary following. (Michael S. Smith even included one at the Obama White House—a detail the former president initially resisted before deferring to the first lady.)
“We’ve been working on The Colony Hotel in phases for several years,” explains Kemble Interiors designer Lori Deeds of the historic Palm Beach property’s ongoing refresh. “And when Sarah and Andrew Wetenhall bought it, they asked me to first redo Villa Bougainvillea, their [former] two-bedroom private home on the property.” Deeds was tasked with making the second bedroom work for the couple’s three young children and still feel on-brand, should they decide to add it to the hotel’s inventory (which they have since done). The firm custom-designed two 40-inch twin beds with simple canopies, lightening up the traditional form to fit with its Floridian surroundings. “In Palm Beach you can go a little lighter—like with the partial canopies we made,” she says. “You can still keep that feeling of coziness and fun while not overdoing it with all that fabric.”
In Austin, interiors and lifestyle designer Ken Fulk took his love for canopy beds to the extreme when designing the six suites for the Auberge Resorts Collection’s Commodore Perry Estate. “I’m obsessed with canopy beds,” says the AD100 alum. “We have one in our house in San Francisco and one in our Provincetown home—a curtained bed just feels so safe and cozy.” His favorite sleeping chamber at the Estate is the Laverne Suite, named for a woman who kept the property going in the years before its transformation. “I wanted it to feel like a destination and the most special jewel box of a room. At first glance it might feel like a lot, but when you’re inside it’s like a giant hug.”
For a recent project, San Francisco–based designer Noz Nozawa outfitted a bedroom for her client’s five-year-old daughter with a kid-friendly version of the classic. “They wanted her to have a ‘big girl’s room’ because she was about to become a big sister,” Nozawa says. So the designer conceived a playful canopy bed that offers both coziness and the feeling of adventure against a custom decorative wall treatment by artist Caroline Lizarraga that evokes a desert sunset. “The ‘big girl’ aspect is the canopy, but in a Joshua Tree sort of way that brings the outdoors in.”
Traditional elements like these can sometimes bring their own fascinating provenance, as Suzanne Tuckerlearned when incorporating a canopy bed in her own guest room. “I bought it from an Albert Hadleyauction about 20 years ago; it’s an antique that he used in a ‘gentleman’s residence,’” she says. “And it’s exactly how Albert upholstered it. It’s all original—I only freshened up what I needed to.” In fact, the bed—with subtle detailing like gathered rosettes under the canopy, scalloping, quadruple pinch-pleats, and lyrical vine motifs climbing the posts—dictated the room’s overall design. “I love the fact that it’s both masculine and feminine [in style], and that he put it into a client’s home and now it has new life in mine.”
Indeed, there’s nothing quite like the classics. Design aficionados and devotees of the elder Hicks—the godfather of canopy beds—just have to thumb through David Hicks in Colour, a new book from Cabana, to remind themselves how a bedroom can come to life with the proper infusion of fabric. Edited by the younger Hicks, with a foreword by Tory Burch, it offers a fresh perspective on the revered designer’s aesthetic and presents his work thematically by color. “I find it gives a completely different feel to the images, most of which will be quite familiar to fans of my dad’s work.”
Just like counting sheep, within each of the tome’s ten color-coded sections, canopy beds jump out one after the other—several of which the son counts among his favorites, including a bed in the family’s holiday house in Roquebrune-sur-Argens, France, from 1970. “The thing about it is that shaped pelmet going around the top—it’s a detail he used often, and an idea he actually got from a wooden pergola over a balcony in Belgravia in London,” he remembers. “It was a couple streets away from his house in the 1950s, so he must have walked past it very often.” He also recalls that, originally, the room didn’t have a canopy. “It just had the bed sitting in the middle of the room, which, honestly, must have been quite uncomfortable—you didn’t even have a headboard.”
Aside from his involvement with the book, Hicks continues his father’s legacy through gestures in his own body of work. For the Milanese home of his partner, Cabana founder Martina Mondadori, Hicks designed a canopy bed similar in style to another pictured in the new book’s Blue pages—the Rose Bedroom at Britwell (named for its rose garden views, not the room’s color)—but did it with his own signature style. “We used a beautiful piece of African Kente cloth that Martina had to make the interior back curtain, while the rest [of the fabric] is one of my prints based on an Italian Renaissance velvet—a combination my father would have strongly disapproved of,” he laughs. “He’d have said, ‘Make up your mind, use one fabric or the other!’”