India Hicks has a dizzying number of titles, including television host, beauty-line creator, model, hotel owner, author, and—oh, yes—heir to the British crown. The one she's proudest of, however, has never appeared in an article or publicity bio: nail technician to her four young children—sons Felix, 11; Amory, 9; and Conrad, 5; and daughter Domino, 1. "You know, I am basically cutting 80 finger- and toenails at least once a week," Hicks says in a booming, highly enunciated British voice that earned her the nickname Decibel when she was a little girl in England. "Eighty! How do I fit in anything else?"
It's an excellent question, since Hicks, 41, heaps so much on her plate and makes it look effortless: In the past year alone, she's hosted the second season of Bravo's Top Design and launched her second all-natural body-and-home-fragrance line, Island Night, with Crabtree & Evelyn. The answer lies in her self-described type-A personality and her home on a tiny island in the Bahamas, where she can focus on multiple work projects without the typical stresses and distractions (traffic, shoes). "When I go to the cities, I love nothing more than fitting in a book launch, a cocktail party, an art exhibition, dinner with a girlfriend, and lunch with a relative," she says. "But when we're on the island, it's very calm and quiet. Most evenings are spent around the kitchen table, eating boiled eggs and soldiers."
Hicks has lived this bipolar life—appearances and party-hopping on one end, eggs and toast strips on the other—for 12 years. The free spirit and familiar face (she's been in ad campaigns for Ralph Lauren, Gap, and J. Crew) moved to the Bahamas for love. During a Caribbean vacation when she was 30, she visited a childhood friend of her sister's, David Flint Wood, a former ad executive who had left the London rat race several years before. Sparks flew during that diving weekend, she stayed, and a few months later she was pregnant with Felix.
The couple, who have never married, and their children live in a plantation-style oceanfront house called Hibiscus Hill. They've built two guesthouses, which they sometimes rent out, and on a little lawn between the main house's outdoor dining room and the ocean, there's a brightly painted colonial-style playhouse. (They've also restored a historic inn on the island, the Landing, into a swanky boutique hotel.)
Hicks's eye for crisp, classic-meets-graphic style, which pervades the entire property, is no accident. Her father was 1960s and '70s interior-design icon David Hicks. "We lived in one of the most astonishingly beautiful houses," she says of her childhood in London. "It was my father's design laboratory, and we had breathtaking interiors." But while her life was decidedly rarefied (her grandfather was Lord Mountbatten of Burma, the last viceroy of India, and Prince Charles is her second cousin and godfather—she was a bridesmaid at his wedding to Diana), Hicks is pleasantly, almost weirdly without pretense. "Obviously, it was a very spoiled upbringing in many ways, but it was unspoiled in others," she says. "We had to wait to receive whatever we wanted for our birthday or Christmas; there were certainly no presents in between." When it comes to her own brood, Hicks admits, "I spoil them much more than my mother spoiled me. I'm very lenient."
