Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 2009. My castaway this week is the interior designer and socialite Nicky Haslam.

Around seven invitations a day land on his doormat. and His life defies easy description. In America in the 1960s he hung out with Andy Warhol

got to know Wallace Simpson and the Duke of Windsor and met Sid Cherries and President Kennedy.

And after all that, he became a cowboy. Impressed by the sleek style of the

states when he returned to Britain he drifted into interior design. His father

thought he was a wastrel but his clients didn't they've included Mick Jagger

Rod Stewart and Brian Ferry my life has been one of passion and I'm very faithful to my

passions in life he says it seems that I'm a bit of a flibity gibbet, but I'm actually not. I read a lot, I know a lot, and I share with other people.

I wonder Nicky Haslam if the trick you pull off is to appear to be something of a

dilatante but in fact you work incredibly hard. Well I think I do work quite hard and

I certainly try to not make it too apparent because I think that if people work too hard and show it they

tend to not enlighten the world or their friends and I think it's very important to

make one friend's happy. And this idea of appearing to be effortless, that

translates itself into your interiors too. I mean anything that you've done you

wouldn't possibly want people to know as they walked into a room that it had been

designed by a designer.

Yes, I think that is true.

I don't have a stamp, but I have a signature.

Also, I do think it's important that there's humor in a decor as well as beauty and

elegance and comfort and all the things that everybody knows should be there.

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