A life redesigned: Allegra Hicks on life after divorce

It is always interesting to see how an interior designer lives. But a visit to the home of Allegra Hicks, creator of exquisite textiles beloved by the smart set, promises to be more intriguing than most. As well as being a showcase for her homewares, her Chelsea townhouse was also a shrine to her equally stylish marriage to Ashley Hicks, furniture designer son of interior designer David, and grandson of Earl Mountbatten. The closeness of their union was reflected

So when they split last year, after 19 years of marriage, redecorating must have been high on Allegra's to do list. The first thing I notice is that the initialled wallpaper has gone; the second, that the dining-room mural of Irish
castles Allegra painted to reflect Ashley's childhood holidays at Castle Sligo has been hidden beneath one of her new designs, a lilac beaded fabric of unabashed femininity. 'It is very feminine, this room,' she agrees in her Italian-accented English. 'What was quite interesting was doing something without anybody saying, "Oh my God, this is going to be horrid, don't do it." You are your own counsellor.'

Certainly, Allegra seems to have experienced some sort of creative rebirth since ending her marriage. She is resolutely loyal to Ashley, whom she met at the Café de Paris in 1988 when he was a student at the Architectural Association and she was studying history of art at Sotheby's, describing him as a 'fantastic father' to their two children. But according to friends, Ashley could be moody and difficult, like his hard-to-please aesthete father David, the most famous interior designer of his age, who used to travel with his own lightbulbs to ensure the lighting didn't offend his sensibilities and who once walked out of hospital while dreadfully ill because the nurses' uniforms were so ghastly.

David was the son of a stockbroker, but he married Lady Pamela Mountbatten, the daughter of Earl Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, and his wife Edwina Ashley, who became one of Britain's richest women when she inherited millions from her grandfather in 1921. Lady Pamela was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, and Ashley used to spend family Christmas at Castle Sligo, where the Royal Family were also frequent guests. Tragedy struck at Sligo in 1979 when Ashley was 16. His grandfather and his cousin Nicholas Knatchbull were in a boat that was blown up by the IRA and both were killed.

It was an unusual childhood, by turns grand and sad, with David's eye for per-fection a constant theme. It is no surprise, then, that Ashley has his own little tics that must have been difficult to live with, such as arranging the books in the house chromatically, rather than by subject or author, and removing any jackets that he found unattractive, which Allegra once admitted 'drives me mad. I can't find anything.' Now, she is free to arrange things as she likes (although ironically, she says she has taken to arranging books by colour herself, which her ex finds amusing).

Relations between the Hickses are civilised: halfway through our chat there is a volley of excited barks as Coco, the wire-haired dachshund, arrives from Ashley's country home. They share custody, she explains: she's with him in the country, and with Allegra in town. So they're on good terms? 'How can you not be on good terms with someone when you have fabulous children with them?' (The couple's daughters, Angelica, 18, and Ambrosia, 13, are both at boarding school.) 'Sometimes life is complicated but there are things that are above complication.'

Allegra, 49, looks like a Renaissance portrait. Effortlessly elegant in a slinky black and blue dress of her own design, teamed with opaque shiny silver tights and vertiginous black heels, her attire neatly illustrates her ability to pair up unlikely colours and patterns to form a harmonious whole. It's a talent amply demonstrated in her new book, An Eye for Design. Arranged thematically by season, it juxtaposes her fabrics with their inspirations: from lily-covered pools to fossilised trees and even
a broken road surface that echoes the
beading on a silk dress. 'What I wanted to say had to do with the creative process, not seen through the intellectual side, but through the six senses that are instinctive to our make-up as a human being,' she says. Actually, her own flair for design is something that few of the rest of us can hope to emulate, since she seems to have the rare gift of synaesthesia – as a child, when her parents played classical music, she 'saw' it in terms of changing colours. She also recalls being mesmerised, age five, by a Picasso line drawing of a dove.

That innate sense of colour and shape was fostered by her design-conscious parents. Allegra was born in Turin, the elder daughter of Carlo and Rosy Tondato. Her father, a physicist and musician, helped design the family home, a Modernist fantasy in glass (interestingly the Hickses insisted on nothing new in their home, while the Tondatos preferred nothing old). Her mother is, she says, 'The most stylish person I know. Compared to her, my sister and I are real slobs. She is 78 and looks 60. She's never been in the sun, which is unheard of for an Italian woman, so her skin is very beautiful.'

An early adopter, Rosy Tondato took up Pilates before anybody else had heard of it. 'She was macrobiotic when I was 13,' Allegra recalls, 'so no friends would come for lunch because they were horrified. And we had a glass table – the first one in Turin – so everyone knew you had to sit incredibly well and not drop any food. We had a rather eccentric way of living.' Although she admits her mother could be terrifying, she has learned to be grateful for the discipline she instilled. 'She taught me very strongly,' she says, 'the sense of strength of the soul. I was so horrified when I was growing up but I'm very grateful now. In moments of great difficulty, discipline is what keeps you going. You always have a choice in life: to learn or to succumb. You're bad at maths, what are you going to do? Or maybe you're bullied by someone. You either get manipulated or learn through it, which is maybe more my nature.'

Although Allegra has the unruffled air of a swan sailing serenely at the top of London society, she has recently been paddling like crazy to keep her head above water. She always had an artistic eye, studying life drawing at Parsons in New York, followed by fresco technique in Belgium and history of art at Sotheby's, but it was not until she had had her first child that she found the creative focus to launch a collection of textile designs in 1995. Once she had added boho-chic fashion to her portfolio, she was crowned 'Queen of the kaftan' by Vogue and amassed a coterie of devoted fans, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Jerry Hall. But all that couldn't prevent her business running into trouble two years ago, just after she opened her first store in New York.

'It was a very unfortunate moment for the whole world,' she shrugs. 'There were huge financial problems and we were one of the many casualties.' Her bank refused to extend her overdraft and the company went under. At the same time, the strains in her marriage reached crisis point. 'Don't they say that troubles come in twos, or threes? It was really very tough,' she muses. 'I was very contained. I had to recoup all my strength. But I had the right help and the right friends and a great family.' Her sister Frederica, now a New York-based architect, regularly flew over to visit her. 'She was supportive in a very lightweight way,' she says. 'And I had a couple of girlfriends for those days when you want to be alone but you can't be lonely. Everyone has days like those, when your fragility comes to the surface. It's interesting when you can deal with
them and your fragilities become strengths.'

Certainly, Allegra's business appears to be on a much firmer footing nowadays. A private investor, whom she doesn't name, helped to rescue the company, which she has now bought back. A new shop on Elizabeth Street in Belgravia opened late last year. 'If you have a passion, you don't lose it, no matter how bad things get. It is a great fortune,' she says. 'But I am keeping the business very small and manageable now. I'm not stretched in too many different directions, and I can control it better.'