Buckingham Palace; The Interiors

The format is approximately 9/75 inches by 12.75 inches. 255, [1] pages. Decorative dust jacket. Illustrated end papers. Foreword by His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. Lavishly illustrated with full color photographs. This is a large and heavy book and if sent outside of the United States will require additional shipping charges. Ashley Louis David Hicks (born 18 July 1963) is a British interior designer, author, photographer and artist. He is the only son of Lady Pamela Hicks (née Mountbatten) and David Nightingale Hicks. Hicks has designed interiors in Europe, the United States, and the United Kingdom. He also has a fabric line for Lee Jofa and furniture lines. Influenced by his father, Hicks studied painting and fine art, graduating from the Bath School of Art and Design and trained with the Architectural Association School of Architecture, in London. He established his own architectural firm, designing interiors and furniture. In addition to interior and furniture design, Hicks produces various lines of fabric, wallpaper, and carpetingâ"some under the "David Hicks by Ashley Hicks" brand and others under his own name. Licenses to his fabric and wallpaper collections are held by GP & J Baker; the licenses to his carpeting lines are held by Stark and Alternative Flooring. In 2002, along with his ex-wife Allegra, he wrote Design Alchemy, which provided an overview of the interiors and products they designed. Hicks began photographing historic interiors for Cabana Magazine in 2016. In 2017 he photographed and wrote a history of Buckingham Palace: The Interiors. Interior designer and artist Ashley Hicks presents his photographs and description of the interior design of Buckingham Palace, home of Britain's royal family since 1837. An important representation of Regency, Victorian, and Edwardian styles, the palace is the work of such noted architects as John Nash and Sir Aston Webb. Hicks records the formal spaces with vibrancy, capturing the magnificent rooms furnished with treasures from the Royal Collection. Starting at the Grand Staircase, Hicks leads us through the state rooms, which include the White Drawing Room and the Blue Drawing Room that both overlook the palace gardens; the Ballroom, which is the setting for twenty investiture ceremonies each year; and the Throne Room, used by Queen Victoria for spectacular costume balls in the 1840s. The long, skylit Picture Gallery is hung with important works of art from the Royal Collection by Rembrandt van Rijn, Peter Paul Rubens, Nicolas Poussin, Anthony van Dyck, Johannes Vermeer, and Canaletto, among others. Decorative furnishings from George IV's exotic Brighton Pavilion lend a fanciful turn to many of the rooms. Extracts from a review by Hamish Bowles in Vogue: Ashley Hicks was given the dream assignment: To set himself loose in the storied palace for ten days with a mission to capture some 21 of its splendid rooms, several of them never open to the public. Hicks decided to photograph them all in the natural light that streams in from the vast windows, and the results, showcased in Buckingham Palace: The Interiors, are sensational: The gilding dazzles, bronzes and hardstones gleam, crystal coruscates, and the saturated colors simply throb on the page. And what colors! There are Winterhalter portraits everywhere you look, along with pale marble caryatids and elaborately inlaid floors and crystal chandeliers and the Order of the Garter woven into a thick carpet, but Hicks has recorded unexpected anecdotal details, too: An 18th century desk swiped from the French royal collection after the Revolution has its fragile marquetry protected from the sun by a linen shroud; an unsuspected jib door that leads into the Royal Closet, where the royal family gather before state occasions. That room itself is fitted with luxury-loving George IV's architectural treasures and cabinets filled with acquisitive Queen Mary's collections of porcelain etuis and hardstone Chinese objects. Hick. …