Want to test your relationship with your mother? Design and build a house with her. “It was the most polite and understanding we’ve been to each other,” confides Edie Campbell, slouched in a stripy deckchair on the balcony of the Northamptonshire homestead she constructed with her mum, Sophie Hicks. “In the past we’ve had a slightly fractious relationship. You’re always ruder to your mother than you are to your friends. But suddenly we were in this professional situation, and we were quite agreeable to each other.”
It helps that the 30-year-old English model—an art history graduate who has fronted campaigns for Fendi and Versace, and is a regular presence in the pages of has a sophisticated understanding of contemporary architecture. And that 60-year-old Hicks is a former British fashion editor turned prizewinning architect whose precise style has lent an elegant practicality to stores for Chloé and Paul Smith,
