‘I have a sneaking love of fakes’

To walk into Nicky Haslam’s Cotswolds house is to enter a trove of exalted taste and mischief. Beyond the garden table (featuring a wooden mallet as a paperweight) is a high-ceilinged sanctuary decorated with jars of Paul Smith pencils, a “grog tray” of Copper Lion gin and Lea & Perrins sauce, a neat stack of Marlboro Reds and a fluorescent orange miniature of Michaelangelo’s David. 

Nicky, 86, a rock god of interior design whose client list includes the King and Sir Mick Jagger, reserves his loftiest decorations for the lavatory – or “lav”, as he prefers. 

“Dear Mr Haslam,” begins a framed letter on Clarence House note paper, positioned on a shelf over the cistern alongside a handwritten note from the King. The letter, written on behalf of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, thanks Nicky for “the corgi” that he put in her car when they attended the same event and notes that she was “very touched”. 

This casual brush with royalty is quintessential Nicky, whose urbanity and artistic eye mean that he has been the designer of choice for Sir Richard Starkey (Ringo Starr), Bryan Ferry, Sir Rod Stewart, Rupert Everett and, lately, the former government minister Nadine Dorries. 

Nicky, whose mother, Diamond Ponsonby, came from a long line of royal courtiers, recalls his encounter with the late Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother with fondness. 

“I went to a friend’s dinner for the Queen Mother,” he says. “I’d recently found a firm that made lifelike plaster dogs, including corgis. During dinner I put one in the royal car while her detective was having his refreshments. I thought it would make her laugh. It did.” 

Born in 1939 at his family’s estate in Buckinghamshire, he found his childhood disrupted at the age of seven when he was bed-bound with polio for three years. His forced isolation made him determined to seize every moment. In the Sixties, he worked at American Vogue under the dynamic leadership of Diana Vreeland before trying his hand at ranching cattle in Arizona. He returned to Britain in the early Seventies to establish his interior design business. By the Nineties and early Noughties, his hyperactive social life meant that he was a fixture at seemingly every celebrity event. 

Now he has discovered a more restful way of maintaining his cultural presence: his annual tea towel listing “things that Nicky Haslam finds common”. His selection for 2025 included clapping the chef after a meal, Dan Snow, Stephen Fry, nduja sausages and – thanks to a suggestion from his friend Rupert Everett – death threats. 

He is currently working on the eighth edition of his tea towel, sometimes sending texts to his assistant, Flora, at midnight if inspiration strikes while he is in bed. 

“Stand-up comedians,” he exclaims when asked what’s in contention for the next towel. “I put it in yesterday. I think comedy’s rather common. They think anybody can be a stand-up comedian. There’s no innuendo, no subtlety in humour any more.” 

What else? “Smoothies.” The fruity drinks or men in cravats and blazers? “Either.” 

With love for Meghan

His distastes are hard to predict. Unlike some from his generation, he loves the Duchess of Sussex, albeit “for all the wrong reasons”. 

“There’s something oddly touching about her. These programmes where she puts flowers on top of cakes: Kirstie Allsopp used to do that and nobody criticised her. 

“I rather like the fact that it’s all manufactured. I’ve got a sneaking love of fakes. They’re amusing. Non-fakes – serious people – are frightfully boring.” 

He thinks that Meghan is “foolish” and “wayward” for kicking against the press, but admires her “guts”. She is making Prince Harry happy, he says. 

“Wouldn’t I rather be living in a lovely house in Montecito with film stars and going to premieres? I would.” 

After a career as the preferred interiors man of rock stars, he has developed a sideline as a singer himself. Last November, he released the album One Night, a collection of jazz and musical-theatre covers recorded at The Pheasantry cabaret club on the King’s Road in Chelsea. It follows his 2013 album of collaborations with friends including Bob Geldof, Bryan Ferry, Cilla Black and Helena Bonham Carter. Helena’s duet with Nicky on his song Last Man Standing was her first music release outside film work, he says with pride. His duet with Cilla on Irving Berlin’s You’re Just in Love was her last. 

He exchanges Christmas cards with Ringo Starr and Barbara Bach, for whom he designed three houses, and describes both Bob Geldof and Nick Rhodes as great friends. 

When asked which star is least like their public persona, he immediately thinks of Sir Mick Jagger. 

“He knows more about music and architecture and the fine arts [than anyone]. He knows everything, Mick. He’s extraordinarily well-read. I’ve been on trips with him in France. He would say: ‘Do you think that doorway is from May 1540 or July 1540?’ He knows about Gregorian chant, Abyssinian music… and he has wonderful taste. His house is perfection.”

Nicky finishes our photoshoot with a tour of his single-storey house, happily discussing his favourite objects. His love of fakes extends to carefully crafted mock-ups of alliums and what appears to be yellow coral but is actually extruded plastic from a building site. 

His mantelpiece of invitations, including one to an exhibition by Dame Tracey Emin, suggests that his joie de vivre is undiminished, but he is conscious of his advancing years. He recalls his mother’s request to put her out of her misery when she was dying, although she died of old age. 

Asked for his opinion on assisted dying, his reply is immediate. “Oh, I’m longing for someone to put a pillow over my face every night.”

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