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They say Woodward and Bernstein got the scoop of the century, pipping rivals at the New York Times to the Watergate post by at least six months. If only WoI had a decoration-minded Deep Throat at work when Aristotle connected the physical senses of taste and touch to aesthetic judgement in the fourth century BC. Scooped by millennia, alas! As it happens, reams have been written on the topic of taste in the decades since – take your pick from David Hume in the 18th century to Susan Sontag in the 60s. But what is a well-travelled path if not for recalling Robert Frost, who, incidentally, had fine taste, living Shaker-style in a wood-panelled farmhouse with white tongue-and-groove dado, spindle-backed chairs, red patterned wallpaper and a wood-burning stove…?
If you’re looking for a single definition of taste, sorry to disappoint – no-one really knows what it is; one can only assume it’s why the phrase je ne sais quoi was purloined from the French in 1656. People like to quote the American socialite Lee Radziwill – that ‘taste is an emotion’ – and might be right, considering the homicidal rage induced by swapping the National Gallery’s bespoke mahogany furniture in favour of flatpack-style benches, both horrible to look at in context and bereft of aesthetic interest (bug-proof benefits aside). ‘What’s next?’ queried one outraged commenter, ‘stripping the silk hangings?’ Which is essentially what the director of the Louvre did in 2019 when switching the original armoured Rococo jewel cases for (the irony cannot be more on the nose) ‘accessible’ modern vitrines – and look what happened there. Taste, however, is not always anti-modern, nor is the past absolved of vulgarity, though it has the advantage of distance. To play the weevils’ advocate, bad taste – such as 1980s imitation-Victorian furniture – can become good taste over time. Like frass and craquelure, nostalgia is its own form of patina.
The topic of taste became a major concept in aesthetics in the 18th century, before which point we must assume that the mortar in which one hand-milled wheat in a sparse hovel was not painstakingly carved with ‘timeless craftsmanship’ or ‘Le Creuset’s limited-edition colourway’ front of mind. Around the same time, the first inklings of taste as an influencing factor on style came from – where else – the French court, and the cake-slice division between the aristocracy and nouveau riche. The remnants of this foundation remain in the general consensus that ‘good’ taste is connected to provenance, appreciation of the arts, craftsmanship and quality (the price point of the latter advantageously out of reach of proles and its worth supposedly invisible to the newly minted). To some minds still, taste is undemocratic, bequeathed like a title or knighthood. In such instances, we should be thankful it’s free from the right of primogeniture.
Taking a more egalitarian view, one could say that everyone has taste – good or bad. Every decorative choice is an aesthetic one, whether selecting an Edwardian hall table, an Eero Aarnio chair or an Ikea shelving unit. That said, there is an objective through-line which is not tied to individuality or location. It is most commonly – and somewhat conceitedly – described as a ‘sensitivity’ to the invisible (and indeed visible) threads that hold together aesthetic tableaux. One might imagine tastemakers humming like tuning forks until they hit the right decorative note, while those less blessed blunder through life like bulls through Minton.
To toss a spanner into the works, taste is not the same as having style and is only related by shotgun marriage to its wayward cousin, cool. Quoting Nicky Haslam’s Christmas tea towels on what taste is not: bottled water, Richard Branson, gilded country gates. One might add ‘graffiti sold by a gallery’ to that list. You get the gist. Cool, on the other hand, has the latitude to incorporate bad taste and reassemble it with irony. Taste can be laid waste by a badly selected paint colour or a fondness for, say, collecting 1990s troll dolls; cool can’t be so easily undone. Style is something else entirely – ‘knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn,’ as Orson Welles put it. Trends, meanwhile, often end up with bad taste swinging indecently from your person in the form of a limited-edition Labubu, clogging your apartment with cheap bouclé chairs or, most egregiously, living without a sense of what you really believe to be beautiful. To quote Arnold Bennett, who had a lot to say on almost every subject: ‘Good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste.’
WoI is not so much preoccupied with good taste as it is with taste in general – why do people live the way they do? What do they surround themselves with and why? A converted pigsty is as good as a palace, as Min Hogg’s motto goes. One might not be in better taste than the other – indeed, a pigsty might be decorated with a more discerning eye for artistry and function than a palazzo where money is no object. But each is as worthy of attention as the other. Having taste, whether good or bad, requires decisiveness – a forcefulness of character to choose the things that one really wants to live with and to know why.
All this to say: clad your walls in tinfoil if it makes you happy, as it did Cecil Beaton. Wear, like Isabella Blow did while cooking in her Eaton Square kitchen, a winged Philip Treacy hat to add style to tasteful substance. Take a hint from Abe Odedina and buy soft tiles for your walls so that ‘you can wipe off traces of your life, but everything you do slightly marks them’. Cultivate an interest in things and where they come from and why you like them. In the end, taste is only unmistakable when it leaves a trace. Assemble your home so that once you leave the room, there is still a story to tell.
A version of this story appears in the February 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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