COLOUR BY DAVID HICKS ( and brokers...)

I read a nice piece by India Hicks the other day in Finch's Quarterly about her father David ( incidentally a very good friend of my Dad ). She was writing about his bold use of colour and described what she called "his fearless relationship with pink, scarlet and orange". This photo of one of his rooms would seem to validate that. He also once drove his Land Rover through a field of daffodils as they were the wrong shade of yellow. This seems to us entirely admirable and we are currently looking for similar targets, though we are all too urban to own a Land Rover.* Correction. Mr Rowell does own a Land Rover Discovery but it has no traces of mud or crushed daffodil, merely Promemoria catalogues and books about obscure mid-century designers.

In fact, in our studio, there are a number of banned colours : at the top of the list is what Bannenberg Snr used to call Barclays Bank blue. I owe it as a matter of honour to him to continue this tonal fatwa. Mr Rowell also has a difficult relationship with members of the coral family and only consented to allow this shade on a couple of scatter cushions under some duress from a Client.

This made me think about the protracted, and often brutal, battles for the colour spectrum waged by various brokerage houses in recent years.Some years back Edmiston carried out a premptive strike for the colour red. Escalation soon followed when YCO annexed yellow and Burgess marched into turquoise which offered little resistance. Yacht Zoo grabbed black, C&N adopted a strategy of divide and rule by controlling two shades of blue. Ocean Independence mounted a long and demanding expedition to the furthest reaches of the colour spectrum and returned with shades new to the human eye.