Nicky Haslam is one of our best interior designers, a charmed and charming agent of style, a tastemaker for the sometimes directionless rich, a brighter star than most of his astronomically stellar client list.
Considering a joint project, I asked him over lunch to tell me all the amazing people he had met. He demurred, but later that afternoon I got a 20-page handwritten document and on page one the names included John Kennedy, Svetlana Stalin, Picasso and Elvis.
But Nicky is perhaps better known to Spectator readers as a contributor of meticulous, gossipy, beautifully crafted, super-well-informed and often rather saucy accounts of what used to be called high society. But how to describe the man to a reader who has not met him? He is elegant, witty, exquisitely mannered, enjoys a party and is generous as a host.
Naturally, he has a good eye, whose vision he applies to himself. The Nicky of the Eighties was a sleekly silver-haired Pimlico decorator-type in a proper suit and statement tie. The Nicky of today, shown as a sort of frontispiece to his delightful new book, has become a high-concept gardener.
In between, there have been other episodes in personal style. I once asked where he got his jacket, a curiosity in metallic turquoise plastic, or some such aesthetic atrocity. ‘Zara, darling. Twelve quid’ he twinkled back at me. He delights in chance finds and has a genius for assembly. In his punk phase, which he entered as a man of mature years, he confided to my wife that he had dyed his pubic hair purple. At the time, he also had a purple car. With this interior designer, the urge to style is total. Recently, he has expanded his repertoire to include crooning jazz standards, many by his old chum Cole Porter.
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