Taste: Are We All Marching to the Forced Beat of the Same Drum?

While reading the news about Margaret Thatcher's passing at The New York Times (one of my favorite sources), I saw and read this interesting article about modern taste and the seeming march of folks decorating their homes everywhere into mediocrity -- perhaps out of fear of being different?  Don't know, but it's a subject of deep personal interest to me.  See what you think:

The Question of Taste

Design

By NICKY HASLAM

April 7, 2013, 5:00 pm

 

WHAT IS IT ABOUT TASTE? A sort of defensive look crosses many people’s faces when they hear the very word. If good taste is mentioned, often the reaction of sophisticates is a counterintuitive: “Oh, yuck.” And if bad, it often yields defiant admiration: “Well, I love a bit of bad taste, actually.” Do they? Don’t they really mean they desire something with guts? Gusto, after all, in Italian, means taste, goût to the French.

And yet, every continent, country and capital, is awash with bland beige, unrelieved by a lot of lifeless leather, a bit of black and a throw. And that’s not just the new breed of “modern” hotels, but apartments and homes as well, for people seem to want their living spaces to look exactly like the hotel, or spa, or friend’s house they just left. This dullness of “taste” is surely a watered-down version of those coolly elegant rooms that were so eye-opening decades ago. Think of the Mercer Hotel-ification of style: those dark brown wenge-wood bookcases are now the sine qua non of ubiquitous, bland modernity. Even an icon of great taste, like Cy Twombly’s house in Rome, has been the object of much dull, middle-of-the-road copycatting. Nowadays, the tedious sameness of so much modern architecture enhanced by a dash of classicism can only make such taste insipid.

For there is a dire lack of oomph in most current interior design, whether ultramodern or traditional, calming or glamorous. The act — maybe I mean art — of making beautiful, comfortable and unique settings of our own is deeply satisfying. The scope to be different is so vast, and luckily, one man’s mat is another man’s cushion.

I’m sure, today, that the interior decoration of Arturo Lopez-Willshaw’s yacht, La Gaviota, looks like bad taste to many, but in its just-post-war heyday, the Orientalism and leopard velvet furnishings were as refreshing as Dior’s contemporary New Look. Likewise, after the bad taste bling and glitz of Versailles coming as it did on the heels of the colder, far more austere Renaissance style, the court breathed a sigh of relief at seeing Marie Antoinette’s lighthearted and light-giving cottons and gauzes at that purposely tumbledown creation, the Hameau; and her sister Queen Maria Carolina, having fled the mauve marble and silver stucco of Naples, preferred bright, natural colors and sparsely furnished Turko-Gothic interiors for the Chinese Palace in Palermo. The décor of both these interior schemes was thought to be the height of almost perverse whimsicality; now they may seem affected, but dull they are not. Taste irons itself out over time.

One of the most unsung tastemakers of the 20th century was Eugenia Errázuriz, a Chilean who lived mostly in France and at whose feet the young Picasso and Jean Cocteau sat enchanted. She tossed away every vestige of Troisième République extravagance and Elsie Mendl’s faux-Louis frippery, making her impossibly chic house in Biarritz almost peasantlike in its purity and ease. Hers was the first utterly simple taste, a throwaway kind of style that stunned people at the time, and that few would dare to emulate even now. Everyday objects were treated with respect, to be considered, whereas current taste banishes the utilitarian behind blandly pale built-ins, leaving no sight of their intrinsic gaiety. Humor, a moment that makes one smile, seems to have vanished from most decoration: taste has become rigidly uniform — those far-too-long, desperately ungiving sofas, furniture arranged to look good with little thought of its actual use, the spiky “pieces” made by “artists” — probably because designers think too hard and not subjectively about it. The London sitting room by Colette van den Thillart, the creative director of my design company, was put together in about three days and yet, while there is solidity and scale, it has a sense of that most attractive quality: impermanence. A wacky, painted theater flat propped on the chair rail, the accumulation of ghostly pale books and objects and soft lighting as if given off from moonbeams. And as every owner of a new space automatically tears out the décor, even if it is by a master designer, to impinge their own taste on it, impermanence is not at all a bad look or idea. Indeed, it suggests a life in progress, one in which living is going on, rather than a stiff, sterile layout meant to count as taste for the ages.

A sitting room at Soniat House in New Orleans’s French Quarter, with its overscaled chairs, has a casual,
almost accidental quality the author admires. [Um, it is a pretty room, but way too much white bleh.]

There is one style that defines all that taste is really about to me. It’s not over-good, or over-bad, or dull, or elaborate. I think of it as uncontrived taste, and it is exemplified in the room pictured [ablove], of the Soniat House in the French Quarter in New Orleans. (The hotel is owned by a couple whose home I decorated.) One senses that its decorator isn’t trying too hard, that the room is just simply right; it is not bland or unconsidered, indeed it is romantic and gutsy, as the furniture is huge and not what one would necessarily consider the right furniture for the room; it has warmth and coolness, light and strong shadows, scale and dignity and a dash of carefree color. One gets an almost imperceptible air of impermanence, yet the scale of the furnishings, their presence, anchors the room into our consciousness. It seems to me summed up in the following words by one of my favorite writers, Sybille Bedford: “The room behind me was all space and order and that aired and ample hard white cleanness of the south that has the quality of lucidity substantiated and forms the limpid element in which mind and body move at ease.” Inspired by her beautiful and simple surroundings, she soon slides into a nearby lake to bathe. And swim against the tide of current taste, perhaps?


Well, maybe, but that Bedford quote - honestly! Is it really necessary and do people honestly believe that if one speaks (or writes) like a pretensious twit one's utterances will be taken more seriously seriously?