On Taste, and the Tyranny of the Tastemaker

There is a particular sort of person who has appointed themselves headteacher of your home. You will know them by their tone, half oracle, half traffic warden, and by their conviction that your sofa, your wallpaper, and quite possibly your soul is in urgent need of correction. They appear with alarming regularity on one’s phone, sorting the nation’s living rooms into the deserving and the damned, and they have never, not once, been invited in.

I have spent my entire life visiting other people’s homes (as we all have), first as a guest, then rather more recently as a designer, and if there is one lesson those houses have taught me it is this: good taste is not a leaderboard. It is not top-ranked, mid-tier, or bound for the skip. It is simply the outward expression of someone’s inward life, and it is none of my business to mark it out of ten.

And yet, open any feed and you will find the opposite view held with tremendous confidence. Chesterfields are apparently over. So, this week, is chintz, brass, beige, and anything that dares to match. Someone, somewhere, has decided that the honey-toned kitchen you saved three years for is now an embarrassment, and they have decided this from a studio flat they do not own, using a ring light they will replace before your cabinets are even paid off.

I find this all rather tiresome. Worse, I find it a little cruel.

A House Is Not a Report Card

Here is what nobody tells you when they are busy grading your curtains: taste is not a fixed quality you either possess or lack. It is built, slowly, out of the things you loved as a child, the corners of the world you have visited, your grandmother’s chair you could never quite part with, and the budget you actually have rather than the one Instagram assumes you do. A pine dresser bought at auction with real joy in it will always, always outshine the “correct” item purchased purely to avoid ridicule.

And that question of budget matters more than the tastemakers tend to acknowledge. Most people do not redecorate their homes as though changing an outfit. A sofa may be saved for. Curtains may be expected to hang for a decade. A kitchen can represent years of planning, compromise and hard-earned money. To casually declare those things dated, embarrassing or tacky is not quite as harmless as it sounds. You are not simply passing judgement on an object. You may be passing judgement on something another person worked very hard to afford, chose with enormous excitement, and still rather loves.

The trouble with trend-policing is that it mistakes consensus for quality. It asks: is this fashionable? when the only sensible question was ever: do you love it, and does it serve the life you actually lead? A family with three children and a Labrador the size of a small pony has entirely different needs from a couple in a Bath townhouse with a horror of muddy paw prints, and no ranking system on earth accounts for that.

In Defence of Doing It Your Way

None of this is an argument for chaos, I promise you. There remains a great deal of craft in getting a room right: proportion matters, light matters, the way a fabric falls or a colour shifts from morning to evening matters enormously. That is precisely the sort of thing a good designer is for, not to hand down verdicts, but to help you find and refine what was already, instinctively, yours. Our job is translation, not legislation.

So here is my rather unfashionable proposal. Let us retire the ranking systems, the tacky-or-not verdicts, the smug little asides about cabinets that dared to be honey-coloured. Let us instead say what is actually true: that a home furnished with confidence, whatever its palette, will always read as more elegant than one furnished with anxiety about what the internet thinks. Buy what delights you. Keep the piece that makes no sense to anyone but you. Ignore, entirely and with great cheer, anyone informing you that your home has failed an exam it never sat.

The most beautiful rooms I have ever stood in were never the most fashionable. They were simply, unmistakably, someone’s own.