Are there some accessories around the home so beyond the bound of good taste they can officially be branded as nasty? JILL CAMPBELL MACKAY thinks so
PEOPLE with bad, or plain bland, taste often have interior décor that they can just about get away with. But, the problems arise when those with bland and bad combined try to do something stylish in their homes. Some folk, on the other hand, are naturally blessed with an instinctive feel for furniture, colour, and settings. They can go off and merrily create beautiful, warm, friendly interiors while others just keep on repeating the same sad style crimes.
Festoon blinds is a good place to start, especially those scrunchy ones that look as if you’ve got a pair of sad baggy knickers hanging in the window.
What about the lure of Chintz? To be honest there should be a law preventing the sale of this stuff, particularly that nasty glazed yellow with pink on it, and those heavily lined curtains rioting with flowers, partnered in crime by layers of contrasting striped swags, and spotty pelmets, all held together with heavy silk ‘hangman’ cord twists and brass hooks.
I visited an English lady’s house in Kamares which boasted four bathrooms, each of the four toilet seats had portraits of cats embellished atop the lids, and the three accompanying bidet covers were a testament to the ancient art of home mosaic. This movement (as it were) is one that will hopefully never vigorously spawn to become a common cult; the thought of spending a penny with ones bum edging on to the host’s embossed coat of arms is not pleasant.
As for any colour other than white in the bathroom, it should be avoided at all times, especially avacado. Same goes for gold taps, illustrative tiling of fish, coffin box shower stalls, glass-fronted medicine cabinets, and those knitted lacy receptacles home owners use to disguise the presence of the humble loo roll.
Lighting in a home is critical to the general ambiance, something you can easily alter to suit different occasions, so it must be kept as subtle as possible. Here the popular option is to follow the Magdi Yacoub School of lighting: glaring strip lights with sufficient power to enable Sir M. to perform a heart and lung transplant. Then there is the worst lighting crime of all, those vast central light fittings and chandeliers with 100watt bulbs blazing out and giving everyone migraines. As for side lighting, well, the bad taste winner has to be the ubiquitous pleated lampshade with contrasting tassels made to resemble a 1960 dirndl skirt in motion.
Carpets play a huge role when decorating a home; the accepted wisdom is that anything swirly or in any way reminiscent of an airport departure lounge/three-star hotel foyers, can seriously damage the ambience of your home. Same can be said for shag pile, white plastic furniture, and those hideous chapel-of–rest-effect net curtains –- all of which need to be treated as dangerous animals and given a very wide berth.
I still spot lamps in homes made from a repro Chinese tea caddy bases, and goodness knows there are enough fussy kitchens sporting cracked effect pictures of vast obese porkers, tea trays printed with hunting scenes, and tiles depicting vinaigrette bottles and grapes.
These horrors abound, along with cushion designs that have been taken from 12th century Latin inscriptions, or embroidered pillows that extol the cheesy virtues of marriage are about as happening as shoulder pads.
SPACE is something that we should all learn to value, so cluttering your room with occasional tables, miss-matching chairs, a wall’s length of glass fronted cabinets (there solely to display the 134 cappe de Monte figurines), a swelling magazine rack, with a clutch of leather Moroccan poufs is a definite no no.
Then there is the plethora of grim, solid vases filled with ghastly cellophane monstrosities, strung up with weird funeral wreath ribbon, packed with repro horrors like those challenging magenta carnations, and purple dyed daisies surrounded by tons of trailing and utterly useless greenery.
Talking of greenery, the British have cornered the market as far as liberally adorning their gardens with earthenware gnomes, mushrooms, tortoises, and all kinds of (not so) life-like animals. It seems that here in Cyprus, the lure of a warm climate sends ex pats into positive rhapsodies of garden abuse. Walk round any British residential complex and you trip over Aeolian harps, several DIY grottoes, pottery heads with green stuff growing out of the scalp, and, of course, the highly desirable five tiered ‘cup’ water fountain.
All over the island you will encounter stunning examples of ‘Temples of Costly Experience’: structures where stacks of money has been spent in order to create one man’s image of his own little Versailles, only to end up with a cross between the Ewing home in Dallas, and a sad replica of Austin Powers’ New York pied a Terre. Granted there will always be a token pair of (concrete) Ionic columns at the front entrance which ironically only goes to remind us that at one time the Greeks were indeed masters of superbly balanced aesthetic forms of architecture.
