FASHION EDITOR TURNED ARCHITECT SOPHIE HICKS HAS QUICKLY WON A SERIES OF COMMISIONS FROM HIGH-PROFILE CLIENTS WHILE APPLYING HER CHARACTERISTIC ORDER AND PRACTICAL APPROACH TO HER OWN FAMILY LIFESTYLE.

Head wrapped around a mobile phone, baby in the crook of one arm, trowelling honey on to brown toast with the other, architect Sophie Hicks briefs the contractors on the kitchen she is planning for Yasmin Le Bon. This is a typical start to a working day for Sophie who, as a mother of three, has learnt to juggle work and family with enviable ease since graduating from architectural college four years ago.

Bare boards, white shutters and walls, clean lines and big comfy sofas in Sophie’s West London home may look like something from the pages of Chic Simple, but the way she accessorises it is quirky: studio lights with big metallic shades clustering in the drawing room; occasional tables on wheels, made of sheets of glass to her own design; oak bow handles on rustic wardrobes which look as though they’ve been fashioned prom planks. Then there’s the mud circle mural by landscape artist Richard Long. He brought along a tub of mud from the River Avon and made hand-prints on an nky black circle on her dining-room wall. Sophie says she likes its “slap-on precision”, which says a lot about her approach, especially as she’d have to leave it behind if she and her husband, financial broker Roddy Campbell, ever moved.

On site later at publisher William Sieghart’s leafy London home, in a dark blue mannish suit tailored by Timothy Everest and men’s shoes, still accessorised with the baby and the mobile, she uses a flame-thrower to zap the snow that has so inconveniently fallen in the night and threatens to appear in photographer Arthur Elgort’s pictures. They’ve worked together before: “Sophie just looks so great in men’s clothing,” says Elgort. She likes looking like a boy: no make-up, a duck’s arse haircut, everything very angular, an androgynous beauty that is deliberately underplayed.

Of course, this apparent insouciance belies a steely will. She insists that the painter swaps his purple sweatshirt for a cream cashmere pullover (mine) to keep all the background colours cool for the Vogue shoot. Sieghart may enthuse Homerically about his “winedark” bedroom carpet, but Sophie wants the picture to be monochrome. That”s her fashion background, first as a fashion assistant before moving on to Harpers & Queen, next as a fashion assistant at Vogue, then for an anarchic stint as the fashion editor of Mark Boxerís Tat/er, a job she got because his wife, Anna Ford, thought she”d be right for it.

Unlikely as it seems, fashion editing was a good preparation for architecture. For a 19-year-old ó-who’d had, “without shocking my parents too much, an appalling education at a London day school, followed by a stint in a Surrey boarding school, then sixth-form college” - it was a formative experience. Sophie learnt to pass the litmus test, changing and adapting to meet the demands of the huge egos she worked with. She learnt about teamwork and tantrums, about the havoc that bad weather and bad hair days can wreak on budgets and production schedules. She absorbed information and discovered the skill of making things happen while being self-effacing.

As Sophie says: “Working with people of many kinds is a very important training, especially for an architect. It’s important for me to discover everything about their needs. I investigate their lifestyle for fiddly, detailed, domestic projects. What things you have, and the space between the shelves to store them is vital so that, for instance, you can house aspirins out of children’s reach on the top shelf. Right back at the very beginning of a project you have to focus on these practical issues and get the drawings right. I know about storing things practically, like wet and dry laundry and how it has to be housed.”

So that’s how she manages her own house-hold so well. After the shoot, she gets back home, and reads to her two older children, Arthur, aged seven, and Edie, five, while baby Olympia contentedly beams at the 10 dinner guests, whom Arthur Elgort has decided he would like to see again in London. Sophie fashionably warms up radicchio and chard, to serve with langoustines in a garlicky wine drizzle, followed by a cheeseboard with perfectly ripened cheeses and rough Italian breads. Very River Café Cookbook.

She threw in her fashion career during one of those moments you could call a watershed when she was in New York. She’d been working for a year and a half on a book about Azzedine Alaia ó the draft lies forgotten in an attic somewhere in Alaia’s Parisian warehouse ó and “Azzedine, like Mrs Thatcher, never sleeps more than five hours a night. He had us all out nightclubbing with Grace Jones. We were dead tired.” She had been in Harlem all day with photographer Peter Lindbergh, Naomi Campbell and Veronica Webb and then Madonna rang her at Morgans to say that, no, she wouldn’t cooperate with the Alaia book. “I’d just had it at that point, and I just thought it would be fun to do architecture. It was make-your-mind-up time and I know how to make decisions. When you’ve seen 500 fashion shows in a few days, you get decisive.”

Sophie’s always been a great networker, so she rang her old friend Norman Rosenthal, director of the Royal Academy - and he told her to check into the Architectural Association in Bedford Square. (It was May, registration had closed the previous September, but Sophie got in.) Rosenthal had previously introduced her to the art world, taking her to every major exhibition and gallery at home and abroad. She still talks more confidently about painters than architects – “I’ve made it my business not to look at too many contemporary architects,” she says, and admits to wishing that British minimalist John Pawson would do a flat for a “gum chewing, baseball-cap-wearing slob with all the stuff spilling out, and the bath overflowing”.

No relation to the Ashleys and Indias with the same surname ó her father is a Sussex market gardener ó Sophie paid her own way through four years of her five-year course at the AA, where she enrolled at 26. She spent 18 months doing advertising styling jobs to meet her £8,000 a year course fees, and then got a bursary in the final year. She also married Roddy and quickly had her first two children while still a student. Sophie matter of factly describes it as “nice having a family when I was at the AA. It made me more focused.”

Her tutor at the AA, professor John Frazer, describes her as exceptionally talented. “She knew nothing about electronics or physics when she joined my course unit on computer-generated architecture for her final two years but she quickly mastered them. And she staged the best diploma show ever, with electronically sensitive antennae that responded to how much attention was paid to them. If they were ignored, they began to flail and shiver and on the last day thrashed themselves to pieces, which certainly got everyone’s attention.” Sophie says he introduced her to technologically innovative projects such as solar energy-responsive buildings, and products like electrochromic glass, which can be clear or opaque. She immediately saw its application as furniture, designing a screen connected to an infrared detector so that it became opaque as people moved past it. She launched her furniture collection, with tables of ordinary glass bonded to honeycomb aluminium - “taking mundane a step further”- at fashionable London shop Joseph.

This kind of superstar attention made her some enemies, and she never dared tell her tutors that even before she graduated she was working on a redesign of William Sieghart and Neil Mendoza’s Forward Publishing offices, and had employed two students to work on house conversions. Forward was so pleased with her work that the company’s two directors commissioned her to work on their houses. Neil Mendoza and his wife Amelia’s stucco-fronted Kensington home is about as grand as a terrace house gets before it detaches itself and turns into a palace. It had previously been partitioned up and boarded over, its magnificent stone staircase muffled in drab carpet. Sophie set to work to free the space so that each floor became open-plan functional, with dining and cooking in the basement in a fluid white space, a floaty, airy living room above and bedrooms and studies on the next two floors. It is a beautifully primed canvas. Amelia, who works in the London office of Vanity Fair, knew exactly what they wanted so, as Sophie says, she “gave them smooth-finish, stainless-steel good looks - very slick, very perfect, in fashion terms like a Prada classic. No split oak-plank cupboards like the ones I have.”

Much more ambitious than a makeover, co-director William Sieghart’s commission involved adding a brand-new glass structure on to the façade of an 1850s artist’s studio. Sophie replicated the original lead guttering and commissioned bronze frames to hold the glass panels, thereby boosting a revival of traditional English craft for a thoroughly modern house. “I didn’t want it to look like a Disneyesque pastiche of the past - the house had to be contemporary and, at the same time, fit in with the old façade.” Building rubbish had to be carried down a narrow, 50 metre-long alleyway to the skip, making it a particularly laborious process.

Sophie is such a perfectionist that she wanted to get a caterer to test the Le Bon kitchen she designed, together with the dining room, for their Victorian family house in south London. So what if Yasmin, in between shows and TV advertising, microwaves fast food on the cook’s days off? “Yasmin’s really is a good working kitchen,” says Sophie. It’s also pretty. Steel kitchens are usually soulless places designed for chefs, more foodie than family, but Sophie made it fun with whirly shell shapes inset in the green-tiled splashbacks. She balanced custom-built steel units – and a very Nineties recycling bin on wheels – with pale woods and chunky chopping boards that fit flush over the sinks. Units stand three inches taller than normal ones because Simon and Yasmin are tall, and Sophie is observant.

There’s no stylistic trend, or “-ism”, to Sophie’s architecture – she gives the client what they want, and need, on the site. The buzz word in architecture today is “contextual” and that’s exactly what she is. Now she wants to design a hotel – and knowing Sophie, it won’t be long before she’s commissioned to do one.