Is It Time to Do Away With “Good Taste”?
Moralizing about interior design may be due for retirement—here are some alternatives to consider instead
As published in Architectural Digest, June 21, 2023
Elsie de Wolfe reclining on a rattan lounger—a material the decorator loved. Photo: Bettmann
In 1913, the designer Elsie de Wolfe published a book that would become a classic of interior design, a profession she helped create during her long career. Entitled The House in Good Taste, its mission could not have been more clear: De Wolfe wished to see American interiors brightened up, styled with a confident point of view, and cleared of the Victorian clutter that crowded so many 19th-century homes with fringe, cut velvet, seashells, and elaborate wood carving.
Were she alive today, Elsie de Wolfe would probably be a refined sort of influencer—the kind of organized, professional woman who knows how to pack a weekend bag perfectly, whose home is free of particleboard furniture or colorful plastic (that is, unless it’s Italian and dates from the early 1970s), and somehow manages to make even her high-tech gadgets appear artisanal. In other words, she’d be someone who can break the rules with nonchalance because most of the time, she’s making them.
De Wolfe was an early proponent of the idea that a home’s design should reflect the owner’s personality, identity, and preferences. All of this means their taste—something that, by definition, is entirely subjective. We all prefer particular foods, music, clothing, and climates, but there’s something about the immersive nature of an interior that makes its relative tastefulness, good or bad, palpable. Inside a house or even a single room that offends, visually at least, there’s nowhere to run—whether it’s from a Tuscan-inspired kitchen or a den peppered with “live laugh love” decor.
That one of the chapters in De Wolfe’s book is titled “The Problem of Artificial Light” is a reminder that her treatise really does hail from another age. But is the idea of taste itself, and in particular the aspirational ideal of “good taste,” out of date too?
An Edward F. Caldwell & Co. chandelier designed for Colony Club in New York. Photo: Cooper-Hewitt National Design Library / Smithsonian Libraries and Archives
First, some history. At least in Europe and the US, anxieties over good taste gained steam in the 19th century alongside the proliferation of mass-produced goods, explains Colin Fanning, curator of European decorative arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Affordable homeware, he says, was “something of a double-edged sword”: “In theory, [it] made a better standard of living available to a wider economic spectrum, but [it] also represented a diminished role for the traditional tastemaking authority of the elite.” And with malleable new materials like papier-mâché and alloys that allowed manufacturers to mimic precious metals, the idea of “getting the look for less” was deeply offensive to those who championed craftsmanship. “[A] wide range of concerned designers and cultural theorists came together around a set of ideas that still guide a lot of our debates on design today,” he says. Those included “notions like truth to materials, honesty in construction and design, the appropriate use of ornament, or fidelity to historic forms and principles.” Fanning points out that even the language used to describe these objects (“truth,” “honesty,” “appropriate”) is loaded: “Much of the prescriptive design literature in the 19th century grappled not just with issues of aesthetics and individual taste, but with a kind of public morality as well.”
We hear a lot about aesthetics and morality today too, but the context has changed: Because of climate change, products made with (or indeed, from) fossil fuels are morally dubious. Things that are made sustainably or involve reusing existing materials to avoid extraction are more desirable, even if their contribution to the health of the planet may actually be negligible. Though mid-19th-century concerns were quite different from our own, they have something in common: a belief that there is such a thing as too much ease and convenience. Victorian labor reformers and proponents of the Arts and Crafts movement were concerned with the exploitation of workers and devaluation of skilled trades, and so are we. They worried that consumers were getting shoddy goods and that this in turn would degrade society, and so do we—we’ve just shifted some of that worry about consumerism onto the fate of the planet.
In an interview with Architectural Digest many years ago, Mario Buatta shared some of his secrets to good design. His “likes” in an interior included “decorating that looks like it happened over a period of time, that it didn’t all land there on the same day.” Dislikes? “Mothers-in-law’s and friends’ opinions and ideas; rooms that are over the top; anything that’s terribly pretentious, over-ruffled, overdone.”
Above, some of Buatta’s own collections, which were auctioned by Sotheby’s in 2020. Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images
Over her career, De Wolfe accumulated a client list few can dream of today: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Anne Harriman Vanderbilt, Henry Clay and Adelaide Frick, and Anne Morgan, to name a few. At her zenith, she developed a vocabulary of design elements that would come to characterize her work. Bamboo and rattan were fixtures, as were chintz fabrics, botanical wallpapers, chinoiserie, and the interior trellis. (De Wolfe referred to it as “the art of treillage”—the most show-stopping appearance of which may have been in the Trellis Room at New York’s Colony Club). If all of this sounds familiar—perhaps like Lilly Pulitzer’s Palm Beach in the 1960s, Mario Buatta’s Park Avenue in the 1980s, or #CoastalGrandmother Instagram aesthetics in the 2020s—well, it should. These are the material building blocks of the decorative scheme that has connoted money, status, and establishment taste since De Wolfe’s own day.
Lilly Pulitzer at a poolside party in Palm Beach in the 1950s. Photo: Slim Aarons/Getty Images
De Wolfe’s book extolled principles of design rather than advocating for specific objects, the vogue for which might come and go. This approach gave it an almost scientific imprimatur—and also seemed to imbue the tastes of the early-20th-century American upper crust with a universalizing status, as if to suggest that their aesthetic milieu exists out of time, like the laureled aeries of Mount Olympus. This idea serves to hide, or at least deemphasize, the fact that the preferences that animated De Wolfe’s design principles were not neutral or elemental, but specific to a social and cultural in-group at the height of its powers. To the extent that coastal grandparents remain style-setters, it’s in large part because this aesthetic remains a neutral form of visual soft power.
Meg Conley, who writes the Substack newsletter “Homeculture,” says that she characterizes good taste as “shorthand for a very particular kind of knowing”—the kind that you show, not tell, in your home through the choice of wall covering or placement of cupboards. The specifications vary from era to era, she tells AD PRO, “But the intention of the design stays the same: good taste, like salvation, has to be something most people can’t attain.” In De Wolfe’s book, the subtext is not spelled out—that part of what makes a Harriman residence a Harriman residence is the people who live there. The House in Good Taste, and thousands of volumes like it, present a holistic experience of social class of which design is just one facet. Can you get the look? Sure, but unless you’re a person of very substantial means, the full experience will remain out of reach.
What if we collectively decided to entertain the idea of moving on, aesthetically? Jason Diamond, a GQ contributor and the author of The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, thinks good taste is as relevant as ever, but that the look it signifies has evolved. “I personally love buildings or designs that came out of a time like the Gilded Age,” he tells AD PRO. “But I recognize that the Edith Wharton–type characters of the era weren’t any different than the boring billionaires of today.” Even some of the robber baron mansions of the 19th century, which look so grand to us in 2023, were gaudy in their time. (“Especially if somebody like Mrs. Astor deemed it so,” Diamond says, pointing out that that’s the thing about taste: There’s always someone making it.) Echoing the tenets of the great design reformers of the Victorian era, he suggests that good taste is essentially about owning one’s aesthetic choices with confidence. “To me, having good taste means you care. It means you have honed your personal preferences and want something more than boring and bland.”
Sarah Marshall, cohost of the You’re Wrong About podcast, grew up in a house full of rather understated 19th-century furniture, but describes her own interior design aesthetic as “tropical maximalism” with a touch of cluttercore. “My house is modeled on Graceland,” she says, “Specifically the Jungle Room.” Marshall thinks much of the power that resides in “good taste” is due to the fact that the United States is “the get-rich-quick country.” Subtle cues, like “the slightly unraveled hem of an L.L. Bean sweater, making me feel like I fit in like the halls of power,” an aesthetic tic of the less recently monied, serve as signposts of nonchalance regarding inherited status, security, and influence.
The Jungle Room, as it became known after the public opening of Graceland in 1982, is widely accepted as the ne plus ultra of kitsch decorating. The tiki-inflected room features green shag carpeting, elaborately carved furniture, faux animal fur upholstery, and wood-paneled walls. The space served as a den for the King of Rock and Roll, as well as a recording studio in his later years. Photo: Paul Natkin/Getty Images
What about good taste today, from the perspective of the people making tomorrow’s iconic rooms? Has its meaning changed? Is it still relevant? Typical of an interior designer, Mark Grattan characterizes good taste as being akin to “reading the room.” “It’s instinctual at its core, and I believe it cannot be trained. Good taste is confident and alluring. I would like to date the personification [of good taste] and live in a world within a home as effortlessly discerning and sexy as him,” he tells AD PRO. “Good taste is subjective but universal. Our cultural differences, societal influences, and who we are as individual people make its meaning as unique as every single one of us.”
Designer Leslie Banker agrees, summarizing her sense of good taste as “prioritizing comfort, paying attention to the proportion, scale, and balance of the furnishings, and avoiding anything garish.” There is something subtly radical in this approach. Old-guard decorating was fueled in part by a desire to set clients apart, to visually cement their eliteness, and not to make their interiors as welcoming as possible. If we leave tenets of good taste frozen in time and place, we risk losing the richness of diverse points of view, reinvention, surprise, and consign ourselves to an ocean of insecure wallpaper and chintz. Making comfort a high priority is a key—if subtle—ingredient in building a more magnanimous, contemporary vision of what good taste means, because it communicates to guests that their company is wanted, delicate polished cotton upholstery be damned. That’s authentic hospitality, which can only be in good taste.