Dear Fiona,
I’m having problems with making decisions, largely because I find it impossible to pin down my taste. Every time I go and see another interior, I love it. So, I go to Charleston, and come home wanting to paint all my wooden furniture and have different coloured walls in that sort of browny orangey greeny palette, and then I go to Kettle’s Yard and I want all the walls to be white and everything to be super simple! And then I look at House & Garden and Sarah Vanrenen’s project in Kent, and I want beautiful wallpaper in every room and skirted sofas in her lovely fabrics. I’m gradually being driven insane – and I’ve got no fewer than 27 bedspreads in virtual shopping baskets and can’t commit to a single one of them. Do I want a Welsh blanket? Or a kantha quilt? Or a vintage Suzani? Or a beautiful hand-embroidered cover from Chelsea Textiles?
I find it embarrassing because I feel that I should know what my taste is. And yet it’s taking years to achieve anything in my home, and what I have got is sort of bland and we don’t actually have enough furniture and we’re still living with the previous owner’s colour choices for some rooms, and there doesn’t feel like there’s a common thread anywhere. Partly it’s because I’m terrified of making a mistake: a couple of years ago, I panic-bought two lamp shades in a colour-blocking moment and now I look at Alice Palmer’s really pretty ones and wish I’d waited a bit longer and bought those – and so I think part of my issue with the bedspread is fear that someone else is going to design a yet more beautiful one. How does everybody else seemingly know their taste so well, and make their own homes look so good? All the advice that I read tells me to look at more stuff – but the more I look at the more I like! And although I’ve got the funds to do up the house, I don’t want to waste money. And so it begins again.
Thank you, in advance, for any advice you’ve got – particularly about the bedspread (it’s for the spare bedroom, and we’ve got guests in a couple of a weeks.)
Love,
An Ever-Wavering Enthusiast XX
Dear Ever-Wavering,
I empathise whole heartedly, for I fall for every single interior style I study, whether that’s romantic maximalism chez Alexandra Tolstoy or the considered serenity of Celia Munoz’s Hampstead home. More, I’ve just returned from Sicily, with its many palazzos and castellos, and have surprised myself by developing a sudden lust for metallic wallpapers, paint-effect marble and velvet padded and buttoned fire surrounds. And, proving that widely-encompassing passion might occasionally be a problem even for the best of us, “choosing anything can be a mine field, especially when you are seduced by what you see other people doing,” reassures the inimitable Emma Burns, Joint Managing Director of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler. Yet indecision is, you’ll doubtlessly be relieved to know, entirely solvable.
Let’s start with looking at the concept of taste. In your letter, you ask for help in defining it, for you believe that in doing so you will find answers (and a bedspread – of which more, later.) I suspect, reading between the lines, that you think that you need to pick a look – whether that’s Charleston, or Kettle’s Yard, or Sarah Vanrenen’s bold and practiced use of colour and pretty pattern – and stick to it. But I’m not sure that actually is the answer, and I’ll explain why.
Firstly, the thing with taste is that it is - as you have discovered – it’s ever developing. The more we see and learn, the more there is that we like - and that’s a good thing, and why so many interior designers suggest that we do look at everything, in real-life, online, in books and magazines, in films, and even in our imagination (we don’t have to see the interiors of Evelyn Waugh’s fictional Brideshead to know that they are – or would have been – tremendous.) If anything, I’d suggest you look at even more. You don’t need to try to decide if something is your taste or not, just enjoy each interior for what it is. You might take away a feeling (such as comfort), a detail (a particular pattern, a style of curtain heading, black horsehair on a sofa, a picture hung low beneath a window) or a design trick (painting over the dado to make it disappear, coffering a ceiling to hide pipes.) Emma suggests you “keep a file of the images that you love, gather together cuttings of fabrics, wallpapers, paint colours.”
But - secondly, and vitally - what must be remembered is that taste isn’t the driver of design – or at least, it shouldn’t be. Have you seen the Instagram account @PleaseHateTheseThings? Scroll down for toe-stubbing reverse-Grecian-pediment legs on a kitchen island, and a staircase adorned with decidedly trip-hazardous loose pebbles. Similarly, I don’t think that the velvet upholstered fireplace that I now covet would work in a country where you occasionally need to light the fire. But perhaps a better means of demonstrating this is to look at that bedspread, which ought to be an easy win. You need to start, suggests Emma, by setting some boundaries: “How much are you prepared to spend? Is there space to carefully fold back and remove the bedspread every evening – or (and let’s remember it’s for a guest bedroom) is it more likely to fall on the floor in a puddle? Does it need to be washable?” You can go further: will guests have dogs with claws that might catch embroidery or loose strands of wool? Do you have cat who’ll kneed it? If the answer to most of these questions is ‘yes’, you can possibly rule out everything except the kantha quilt – which would look lovely, and they don’t crumple and are almost indestructible. “If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll end up with less choice. Planning is all; taste follows,” explains Emma. (Although, if you do still have too many possibilities, there’s that old game of putting the items side by side, two at a time, discarding one and one again until you’re down to the final option.)
But knowing Emma’s point – planning first, taste second – can help everywhere. And within that, further aid often comes from the house, or the room. “I think about what a room ‘should’ look like,” says Brandon Schubert, of his decision-making process. A variety of things will affect that ‘should’, from age of the house, to direction the room faces (which will possibly inform the palette – you can’t treat a north facing room exactly as you would one that faces south), to how the room needs to function; a dining room has to have a table and chairs, a sofa needs a side-table beside it, so that you’ve got somewhere to put down the book or magazine you’re reading, and your cup of tea. There needs to be a variety of heights, and each piece of furniture needs to be of an appropriate scale (though you can play with this) and comfortable.
Only now can you go back to the concept of taste, and pull out the file that Emma suggested you assemble, and perhaps start putting together a mood board – which is not a whole load of things in isolation, but a means of “reviewing your ideas and seeing if they gel together; you’ll be able to refine them again and again as you look at the combination,” Emma explains (there’s a helpful how-to here.) A good idea, if you’re someone who is indecisive by nature, is to start with one thing, which might be a particular fabric, or a painting, or a rug, and let that inform your palette, and thus the other decorative contents of the room. You don’t have to do it all at once (though do remember that if you’ve chosen x because it goes beautifully with y, but then only have x, it might look a bit like a lone island.) A good tip from Nina Campbell, if you are someone who likes everything and therefore might want to make changes down the line, is to ensure that the most expensive items (e.g. the sofa) are in a neutral colour as it’s cheaper to change scatter cushions than it is to change seating. But, as you become braver, you can begin to rely less on what’s available, and instead cast into your mind’s eye for what would look good, and design your own solutions to bookshelves, or a cocktail cabinet, or even a wall colour; Nina’s entrance hall is painted in a gloriously uplifting ombré turquoise.
In the meantime, try and trust your instincts. Kettle’s Yard, Charleston, and that Kent project by Sarah Vanrenen aren’t as dissimilar as they might seem at first sight: rather, they’re all interiors that tell the story of the person or people who reside in them, they’re biographical – which is the best kind of interior, and what yours has the potential to be, too. At its simplest, taste is what you like, you are the common thread, which is why taste isn’t slavishly reproducing a room you’ve seen elsewhere. You just need to commit, while channelling that great Roman statesmen, Cicero, who famously stated that “more is lost by indecision than wrong decision.” (He might even have been talking about interiors – for he also reckoned that “if you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”) Rooms can be repainted (we’ve all had to correct wrongly chosen colours – ‘all’ being me, Pandora Sykes, and Susan Deliss), things moved around – and even the ‘wrong’ lampshade can be made right by adding a trim, or adorning it with an inked pattern (which is very Charleston, incidentally.) (Alternatively, banish them to a children’s bedroom, and buy the Alice Palmer ones you want.)
But above all, please remember that decorating really is meant to be fun. And if making decisions still seems overwhelming – which is not embarrassing, not all of us have the same skill sets - what might be most enjoyable is to decorate your house hand in hand with an interior designer who can help translate your thoughts into a cohesive scheme. Handily, we’ve got a good number of recommendations.
(Though I hope that you’ve at least now got a bedspread.)
With love,
Fiona XX
