Deja Vu

Starting on a design project for a master bedroom, I took a hard look around me at the swatches and tear sheets and realized every single thing I loved was a 'design don't.' What's more, everything had already been done. Yep, fancying myself quite the style arbiter, the new thinker and the setter of new trends was merely a delusion. Trying to be 'oh-so-with-it,' I was casting about in what amounts to a universal design attic.

When Ashley Hicks decided that he would resurrect his father's (David Hick's) pop art geometric designs for rugs, wall coverings and fabrics - with their iconic look of Mary Quant's Carnaby Street - he unwittingly unleashed a stoned tiger. Yep, the whole darn world is in love with David Hicks.

And thanks to Mark Hampton's devoted offspring, daughter Alexa, New York's famous decorator/style guru is equally alive today with collections bursting out of the D&D Building. If only Mark had had Alexa's stamina, he'd be ruling Target by now. And if the original design vivant, Billy Baldwin, were alive today he'd feel very much alive - a cult figure with a trailing horde of fancy decorators happy to walk in his footsteps. I know I'd be racing after him in Jimmy Choo mules.

Because Baldwin's design influence has seeped into the very fabric of our so-called 'modern' thinking, streamlined furniture in poppy colors, shaggy rugs and the juxtaposition of pricey antiques with zebra flourishes and souped-up velvets make for a way of looking at design that is irreverent and stone-cold classic!

Natural materials such as horn, ostrich skin and shell inlays make for a veritable Serengeti of style, reminding us how the Victorians decorated with their garish elephant-leg stools and stuffed-rhinoceros mounts to show the world that they'd traveled. Now, we look back at the middle of the last century and long for that innocence - shed of the stuffiness of the Victorians and their gloomy, tchotchke-choked interiors and the too-stylized look of Deco. The look was frankly American, spare and elegant, with a nod of the stylish cap to other designers such as Blass and Halston.

And it doesn't stop there. No, the locomotive of yesterday's trends keeps a rollin' with monogramming, Lucite and Parsons-leg tables bumping up against Flokati rugs and calfskin ottomans. I don't know about you, but I'm feelin' groovy!