Taste This!

After attending a zillion design workshops last month with fancy-pants editors, designers and bloggers, I was rocked back on my Badgley Mischka evening sandals—worn very inappropriately at high noon—when I attended a presentation put on by a designer who shall remain nameless. She proceeded to treat her audience to a slideshow of rooms “in bad taste” from the 1950s to today. She was seemingly suggesting that the slavish adherence to trends was a big no-no. OK, we can all agree that our parents’ love of avocado and rust in the ’60s did damage to our psyches, but who was she to say what was bad taste? Perhaps now is the perfect time for a debate.

Edwardian interior decorator Elsie de Wolfe put it best when she said she preferred a “witty exhibitionist to a dull duke.” Amen, sister! In fact, as we move more and more to sameness—thanks to stores like IKEA, Crate & Barrel and Pottery Barn (and I shop them all, by the way)—there is a chance that we are getting bland. Where there is no personality there is no taste and, as Dorothy Parker said, “A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.” Get out your spice rack.

I know that fashion designers are all over this idea, creating wild and unwearable clothes for their runway shows, but in interior design we have an easier way to express ourselves. Let your freak flag fly. Mine does and no one seems to mind. Well, my daughter, Anabelle, did give me the once-, twice- and three times over last week as I headed out to the showroom. She scorned my top hat, derided my shaggy red fur coat and swore she would never speak to me again if I wore the same tulle ballet skirt ensemble (or, as she called it, my “Big Bo Peep” look) within five miles of her school. I didn’t care, and that’s the point. If we keep hearing that coral is in and buy a pillow that follows the trend, do we chuck it when someone says it’s so over? No! Not if we like it. The safest bet may be to avoid trends altogether but that’s no darn fun either. I like mirrored furniture and am not throwing mine out. In fact, I’m thinking about mirroring an entire room at the next show house.

My homes have all been photographed, and when I think of how little money I have spent over the years on décor, I have to ask “Why?” The answer: Because my choices have all been wildly idiosyncratic. I went to Haiti and then painted a mural of downtown Port-au-Prince on my living room walls. I liked trellis so I did pink grosgrain ribbon all over Anabelle’s room. I like Gustav Klimt, so with my house painter, I did a mural of squiggly gold, black and white giant rectangles in a day. And right now, I am painting Anabelle’s room with fashion figures that I saw in a 1960s issue of Vogue. If you love seashells, get gobs of them. If you like driftwood, use it in all your vases. If you like chartreuse, go crazy with it.

Last year, my friend Deenie begged me to deck out her bedroom in violet. Her husband, Toby, promised he would never speak to us again. He is British and it was simply bad, bad taste to “tart up a room like a bordello.” But we did it, with a violet rug, violet walls, violet draperies and cool fabrics from Manuel Canovas, F. Schumacher and Jim Thompson. I was there last weekend and found him nestled in his purple boudoir, happy as a clam. What’s more, when we all decamped for the Royal Ascot in June and landed at his sister’s elegant flat, we found that she had replicated his bedroom in none other color than violet. Now, he says he couldn’t sleep in a room that wasn’t purple. His family sent him off to bed with the wish, “Purple Dreams!”

With the jet lag, he slept 18 hours.