Fran Hickman: The London Designer Turning Buildings Into Stories
Reviewed and last updated on July 16, 2026 by admin
Walk into a Fran Hickman interior and the first thing you notice isn’t a single statement piece. It’s the mood. A copper and marble cafe that feels like it grew out of a Brutalist tower block. A members’ club that borrows its geometry from Japanese woodblock prints. A shopping boutique built inside a converted stable, dressed in art deco pink. Each space feels entirely different, and that’s the point. Hickman doesn’t work from a signature look, she works from a question, what does this building want to say, and who is it saying it to.
Today, more than a decade after founding her own studio, Fran Hickman is one of London’s most sought after interior designers, with residential and commercial commissions stretching from Notting Hill townhouses to hotel and retail projects in New York, Dubai, and Tokyo.
An Eye for Space, Formed Early
Hickman’s fascination with interiors didn’t begin in a design studio. It began at home. She was raised in an old Kensington townhouse alongside five siblings, a childhood she has described as loud, cluttered, and full of people, which taught her early on to value a well made personal space. Her father, a property developer, gave her an early education in spatial thinking. He built furniture for the family’s centuries old farmhouse in Sussex and collected art and classic cars, instilling in her a broader appreciation for design as a form of storytelling rather than decoration.
That instinct followed her from London, where she studied at the London College of Communication, to New York, where she enrolled at Parsons School of Design. It was there, gathering with friends at the newly opened Soho House in the Meatpacking District, that she first understood how powerfully a well designed room could shape behavior and atmosphere. She later returned to London and cut her teeth at respected firms including the Soho House Group’s in house design team, Colefax and Fowler, and Waldo Works, absorbing the discipline and craft that would eventually shape her own studio’s voice.
Building Fran Hickman Design and Interiors
In January 2014, Hickman struck out on her own, founding Fran Hickman Design and Interiors in London. The studio’s breakout moment came with the Chess Club, a restaurant and members’ bar spread across three floors of a Mayfair townhouse, where she wove Japanese inspired organic and geometric forms through the space. It was a project that put her firmly on the map.
From there, the studio’s portfolio expanded quickly and internationally. Sleek lofts for the Vinyl Factory music company, a Victoria art gallery, a musician’s bachelor pad, and one of her most talked about commissions, the London headquarters of luxury e tailer Moda Operandi, a former stable reimagined with silk lined screens, bespoke trunk show inspired storage, and art deco pink dressing rooms. Later projects include Emilia Wickstead’s Knightsbridge boutique, the Huishan Zhang store with its interconnected moon gate motif, a Manhattan nail salon called Paintbox, and Locket’s, an all day cafe and wine bar in a Brutalist St James’s tower, where copper, cork, and green veined marble echo the building’s raw concrete bones.
A Philosophy Rooted in Feeling, Not Furniture
Ask Hickman how she approaches a project and she’ll tell you it starts with the building itself, its history, its location, its bones, before she even considers the client. Her studio deliberately avoids a house style, working instead to build a distinct design language for each brief. She has spoken about designing from the inside out, treating a space’s emotional effect on the people who use it as more important than any single object placed in it. Materials, texture, and atmosphere take precedence over what she calls the weight of stuff.
That philosophy has earned her serious recognition within the industry. She was named Interior Designer of the Year at the Elle Decoration British Design Awards in 2019, has appeared on House and Garden’s Top 100 Interior Designers list annually since 2019, served as a jury member for the Pavilion of Art and Design from 2017 to 2025, and was featured in Phaidon’s By Design, The World’s Best Contemporary Interior Designers, published in 2020.
Beyond the Studio
Hickman has talked about her enduring love of a 1967 Mercedes Pagoda, a nod to her father’s own passion for classic cars, and about her ongoing, always postponed project of decorating her own Notting Hill flat. It’s a case, she’s joked, of the cobbler’s children going shoeless. She’s also spoken about developing a small line of bespoke furniture pieces drawn from her studio’s archive of custom designs, aimed at clients who want distinctive pieces without commissioning a full interior overhaul.
What comes through most clearly, across a decade of interviews and a growing body of work, is a designer who treats every commission, whether a private home or a public facing brand space, as an exercise in storytelling. For Fran Hickman, a room isn’t finished when it looks good. It’s finished when it feels right.
