Designer Allegra Hicks shows how understated style unifies interior decoration

International designer Allegra Hicks encourages decor that engages all the senses.

She married into one of the most famous contemporary British design families, the Hicks dynasty.

She is a fabric designer and an in-demand interiors expert whose soft, accessible style is the antithesis of minimalism and visually shouty​ impact decor.

“Luxury does not need to be in your face,” advises Allegra Hicks.

Her reputation branding, and the cast of her printed and embroidered fabrics, homewares and one-off rugs is labelled “Bohemian Luxe”.

She reckons it might be because she was “a hippie” and that the most defining moment in her design evolution was arriving in India in her impressionable youth “and seeing 1001 things in one light”.

Addressing the Melbourne seminar series as a keynote international speaker at the Decor + Design Exhibition that closed on Sunday, the elegant Ms Hicks more or less gave her sanction to dispensing with any idea that there are exacting rules to the decorating game and instead, endorsed sticking with the furniture or art pieces and the colourations that make you happy.

“You do what you like.”

When working with a new client, Allegra Hicks says “the backbone” of any scheme commences “with the client’s favourite colours and the furniture they intend to keep”.

“When I’m doing rooms for myself,” she says, “I generally start from the rug.”

Italian-born and educated as an art student in Milan, Allegra continued studies in the UK where she married her first husband, architect Ashley Hicks, son of the late and legendary David Hicks, the man who showed how chic it could be to mix antiques with modern design and decor.

Crediting her father-in law as “a genius”, Allegra Hicks found him “massively inspiring” and believes in the same philosophy: “Understated style can work with modern and old together,” she says.

But what she does wish to encourage more is design that appeals to all senses, “all the six senses and not just to the eye or the intellect. It can be eclectic and it does mean that you don’t say ‘no’ to anything”.

While her colourations and delicate patterns are most often inspired by nature and commence as watercolours that allow for “a wonderful transparency and the odd happy accident”, she shows just how densely, and even lavishly differentiated pattern can be combined in layerings of wallpapers, fabrics and rugs.

“I’m happy having four to five different patterns together and I like to disperse pattern in a scheme. Why they can work together,” she explains, employing an unconscious pun, “is maybe because they have a common thread. Backgrounds and foregrounds and optical illusions are the territory of patterns.”

Soft and feminine is a most evident signature of her work and her own London home, yet Hicks can also do bold and sensibly encourages her clients “to keep their personality”.

“Don’t be afraid of colour because colour can be so incredibly enveloping and nurturing.”