Lifestyle Choices

Although money can’t buy it, anyone intelligent can learn to have good taste. You can spend like a drunken film star, but you risk an expensive clutter that hasn’t quite come off. If you pay someone else to design your home you risk something pretty expensive, lifeless and unlived in, or alternatively, an exuberantly camped-up setting with mouldings picked out in white and in which you feel uneasy.

So the first rule is Do it yourself. Because otherwise you’ll never learn.

Discovering your own good taste is an unpeeling process, eliminating the layers which other people have impressed upon you. One of the easiest ways to find out what you like is to get a pinboard and start sticking up anything which takes your fancy — a scrap of lace, photographs, postcards, a colour swatch, a cartoon.

Then start to decide what you like best. Because good taste is the result of severe and constant pruning. Your taste develops and crystallizes. You create your own perfect environment by cutting out everything else.

You might like several styles — art deco, art nouveau, Bauhaus, functional and cottage modern. But, unless you’re very sure what you’re doing (and very few people in Britain are) stick firmly to one style.

Look at the way you dress : the colours of your clothes will also suit your room, which will then also suit you. If you’re a brown and cream woman, go for that sort of room. If you’re a silk girl, choose silky rayon. If you’re a tailored type, so should your room be.

HOW TO BE A FAMOUS DECORATOR

Use self-discipline: For instance, in a bedsitter or small flat start with one colour theme and allow yourself only two subsidiary colours and two patterns — at the most. If you have a flat, using one overall colour scheme will make it more coordinated and pulled together, so will one floor colour throughout.

If you’ve got a badly shaped room complicated by writhing pipes or oddly boxed-in areas use a dark colour all over walls and ceiling to simplify the area.

If you’ve got a horrid little box- shape, low-ceilinged room, pull it together with a small but strong traditional pattern over walls and ceiling.

Be realistic: Just as you can’t wear belts if you haven’t a waist, or milkmaid smocks if you’re six feet tall, you may not be able to indulge in ornate Victoriana in a modern flat, or pristine chrome and glass and fragile ivory figurines if you have five children and two labradors, or bright pink anywhere (corset pink is the only colour allowed nowadays).

Be ruthless with presents, however kindly given, if they are somebody else’s taste and not yours. Sell them, swop, or hide them, because if you don’t really like them they only distract your style. Say, `I’m saving it until I’ve got a bigger place!’ or ‘My mother’s looking after it for me.’

No one’s forcing you to be ruthless, but that’s the only way to get the best effect.

Don’t compromise: Don’t settle for second best. Don’t have anything that is nearly all right. It should be the best or an obvious stand-in; if you long for a glass and chrome TV table, don’t settle for one which your mother offered you with cabriole legs. Stand the thing on an orange box or on the floor.

Lack of money need not cramp your emerging style. For seven years I was a designer, producing rooms for other people. However, apart from one antique chandelier, my personal life has mostly been lived on exultant street market bargains, chain store furniture, cheap beds that broke, prototypes which fell apart and painted junk. But as Mae West never said, money isn’t everything. The decorative jobs that I’ve been most pleased with have always been the cut-price, no-room-tomove rooms.

Don’t accumulate: Apart from lights, carpet and curtains, the more you remove from a room the better it tends to look.

Analyse your fatal weakness and stamp it out, whether it is for Tudor chandelier light fittings which look as if Errol Flynn should be swinging from them, or a passion for making your own lampshades (I’ve never seen a home-made lampshade which didn’t look wrinkled, tired or slightly drunk).

Stamp out your pretensions, too. You can go out looking like a million dollars when you aren’t worth a bus fare and people will only applaud, but you can’t fool anyone in your home. Whatever your pretensions — intellectual, social, financial, or moral — they will soon show up in your personal setting.

Finally, know what you’re good at and emphasize it. Don’t try anything else. If you’re a patchwork-andhomemade-scones girl with good childbearing hips, you won’t give an authentic impression of yourself in an incense-fuddled Biba boudoir. But if plants just grow for you, have banks of massed ferns, if you’ve got an eye for little objects, collect tables of them. The trick is to know what you’re bad at and not do it; to know what you’re good at and emphasize it.

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