Hooked on classics

A new generation of designers is learning the language of Greek and Roman architecture, finds

- Matthew Dennison

IN the spring of 1960, 30-something interior decorator David Hicks did not intend to buy a country house. An advertisement in The Times for Britwell House in Oxfordshire changed his mind. Still at the start of his career, Hicks had already established a signature style, described at the time as 'a world of beautiful things, of gay whimsical colour combinations, of rich materials, of subtle lighting'. At Britwell, the attraction was quite different: 200 acres of greensward, an obelisk in the park and, in the hall-the first space the visitor enters a Baroque chimneypiece of leviathan proportions, dominated by a handsome broken pediment.

Throughout his career, Hicks repurposed classical details in a manner that was sophisticated and high in impact. Pediments-triangular or segmental gables, placed above an entablature on columns or a cornice—were first used structurally in Greek architecture and subsequently employed decoratively: both externally, as in Palladio's soaring pediment on the façade of the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, Italy, and internally, to crown doors, windows, chimneypieces and niches, from the grandest examples, including the carved and gilded pedimented doorcase of the Saloon at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, to homelier examples in the halls and drawing rooms of country rectories across England.

In the double-height drawing room of a new house in Portugal in the 1980s, Hicks topped the chimneypiece with a tall, pedimented mirror frame that raises the eye to the ceiling, maximising the wow factor of the room. In other instances, he used pedimented furnishings to add elegance and symmetry.