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70 " I'm still staggering," Min Hogg tells me by phone from her Knightsbridge fl at in London, where she's returned from posting a letter in the mail. "I've just seen a girl who got out of a Rolls-Royce in the most ghastly clothes. I can't bear it. Everything on her is studded with crystals and diamonds and hung together with strips of fur and bits of leather." Her dismay doesn't surprise me. For Hogg, nothing is more sublime than the simple and the humble. Hogg has been an arbiter of style and taste since the '60s, fi rst as a student under Sir Terence Conran at the Central School of Art and Design (now Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design), then as a fashion editor at Harpers & Queen, where her assistant was Anna Wintour. But her big moment was In 1981, when she founded the groundbreaking magazine The World of Interiors. Hogg's 20-year tenure at the helm forever changed the way magazines cover interior design and infl uenced generations of interior designers. "Back then, most magazines concentrated on what th e decorators were doing," she says. "But, to me, the best rooms were done by the gifted amateurs. It was most exciting to fi nd a little old lady or a grand old professor doing it themselves." In The World of Interiors, Hogg focused on objects and places of simple yet breathtaking beauty, from a tattered 18th-century Swedish country house to a Brazilian folly or a derelict stable reinvented by a young squatter. "Just because something is expensive is pointless," she says. "It's either good or bad. A little cottage in the hills done by nuns can be beautiful." A couple of years ago, British interior designer and socialite Nicky Haslam, looking for wallpaper suggestions for a project, called Hogg. "He said, 'Oh, you know about design and color and things. Could you design one?'" she recalls. Haslam arrived with an 18th-century engraving of seaweed as inspiration. To make the design modern, she blew up parts of it on the photocopier, then took pen, pencil, and scissors to it. She quickly realized she had to learn to do a repeat. "I rang up my ex-art director at The World of Interiors, Mike Tighe, and we sat hugger-mugger with the computer and did it all together." A collection of 19 wallpapers and fabrics was soon born, all inspired by Haslam's seaweed engraving. "It's digitally printed in the north of England," Hogg says. "But it looks IF WALLS COULD TALK … OH, THEY DO A CHAT WITH THE WORLD OF INTERIORS FOUNDER MIN HOGG BY REBECCA SHERMAN Sea Feather Stripe fabric on left chair. Sea Webb wallpaper, right. Background paper, Sea Sponge, small. Sea Feather Stripe in pink and gray. Sea Sponge in pinks and white (continued on page 72)