When it comes to getting advice, Kathy Hilton goes straight to daughter Nicky Hilton for her opinion.
“With clothing, I won’t wear anything without sending it to her,” Kathy Hilton tells TODAY.com. “And she’ll send (photos) to me and say, ‘What do you think? Do you like this better or this better?”
“We’re very in sync,” adds Nicky Hilton. “We have very similar tastes in pretty much everything.”
For the past 18 months, the mother-daughter duo have had a number of phone calls and Zoom meetings in preparation for their first project together: Ruggable x The Hiltons, a collection of sophisticated and elegant rugs.
“And I’m not good at (Zooms),” Kathy Hilton says with a laugh, while her youngest daughter nods her head in agreement.
“We’ve had a ball doing it,” Nicky Hilton adds. “We speak 100 times a day. And we have never collaborated together professionally, so it was really a fun experience and I hope for more to come.”
The sun is officially shining in Los Angeles — and especially at the Hilton matriarch's stunning Beverly Hills home — after a gray May and early June gloom.
Before a full swing of close friends like Kris Jenner and Rachel Zoe make their way inside the Hilton home, Paris Hilton poses with her sister and mother, while her 1-year-old son Phoenix comfortably roams around the outdoor patio he frequents.
Her grandchildren, Kathy Hilton says, enjoy spending time at this very home, and just like her and Nicky Hilton, appear to have an eye for design and entertaining.
“We like entertaining together a lot,” Kathy Hilton says, before sharing how Nicky Hilton's daughters Lily-Grace, 7, and Theodora, 6, have a special request when they go over to her home.
“So the children now, we celebrate their birthdays out here too. So they say, ‘Kiki, we must do the table,’” she explains. “I like to put the cloths so that they hang right, but they want to help decorate the table.”
Nicky Hilton recalls how over Thanksgiving, they were in the Hamptons and her little girls helped with the tablescape.
“It was very cute,” the mother of three says. “My mom was decorating the table and she had the girls go out to the backyard and get all the red and yellow pretty leaves to have little accents (on the table).”
Working together came natural for the mother-daughter duo — despite some lifelong obstacles.
“She’s not easy to make plans with,” Nicky Hilton says, adding, “She’s very tardy.”
The comment provokes Kathy Hilton to say, “Ohhh!” before comparing her daughter to husband Richard Hilton and his late father, Barron Hilton.
“She’s just like her father and grandfather. And I’m like, ‘Six o’clock mean 6:15,” she says, with Nicky Hilton quipping, “Or 7:15.”
Kathy Hilton continues, “When she was 10 years old, she’d be like, ‘You said Christmas dinner was at 6:30. It’s 7:00 now.”
Despite the time management, what the two created is a “very personal” collection designed with their family history in mind.
To get started, they shared a Pinterest mood board which they added photos to daily.
“Whether it was art, fabrics, photos of our old homes, photos of hotels we lived in, chairs, fabric, sconces, antiques, everything,” Nicky Hilton says. “We were really inspired by our homes, and we named a lot of the rugs after family homes, places that we grew up in.”
For example, The Brooklawn is named after Nicky Hilton’s grandfather’s estate. The Astoria is inspired by the Hiltons’ long-time residence at The Waldorf-Astoria, and The Chrysler draws its name and look from the Hilton matriarch’s favorite view when living in NYC.
When Kathy Hilton isn't working on a fun project, she's busy as a returning “friend of the housewives” on the upcoming Season 14 of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.”
She says her return to the Bravo franchise stems from her always having “a great time” on the show.
“If you’d asked me this six years ago, I would have said, ‘Are you out of your mind? There’s no way,’” she says about being part of the show. “I just have a little part-time job there. I come and go as I please. I really can be on as much as I want or as little as I want. And I like all the girls.”
Kathy Hilton joined as a friend during Season 11 in 2021 and was on “RHOBH” for two seasons. She was not part of Season 13.
“I’m excited to be with my sister, (Kyle Richards) and spend time with her,” Kathy Hilton says. “I’ve gotten close to a lot of the girls and we have two new girls. I know Jennifer Tilly well because I’m very close with Sutton (Stracke), who’s one of her best friends. And then Boz Saint John, who was the CMO of Netflix and Uber. She’s brilliant and fun.”
She says “it’s kind of interesting to watch and observe” Saint John come into her own around the other housewives. “It’s really been a fun experience and I’m happy to be back,” she says. “They don’t tell me what to do or say.”
In the meantime, Kathy and Nicky Hilton say they have plans to expand into the home space, even teasing a holiday collection of some sort. “We’re two Christmas nuts,” Kathy Hilton says, with Nicky Hilton adding, “Stay tuned.”