in good taste

It’s virtually impossible to define ‘good taste’. It makes me laugh/cry that there are so many people (“experts”) who feel it’s their role - or are paid - to tell others what it is. According to many of them, good taste consists of living in a totally grey world with nothing that would “épater les bourgeois”. But that’s just timidity, not taste.

I’m overstating things, of course, and I like some grey here or there. In fact, it’s been the mainstay of my wardrobe for years. But I realise that now that I’m going grey, if I wear grey I look as though I’ve been rubbed out, erased, and am just ghostly remains.

So it’s colour for me, and sod official “good taste”. Fundamentally, truly good taste is innate and rare, and I feel very fortunate to have encountered six people who have what I consider to be not just good, but exceptional taste which has influenced me enormously. What they have in common is their way of selecting, combining, thinking and expressing, which all adds up to more than just taste and becomes a way of living.

Here are six of the best, in the order I discovered them.

Kaffe Fassett

[my quilts which acknowledge Kaffe’s ideas and fabrics]

Where do you begin with Kaffe? I’m one of thousands and thousands of people whose lives he has made more creative and colourful. It all began in the late 1980s when I working for a multi-national drinks company in St James’s in London, and I heard that Kaffe was giving an early afternoon talk at the ICA. I bunked off work, raced across St James’s Park, and sat entranced as he opened up a world of possibility, colour, pattern, creativity - all with immense enthusiasm and charm. And the underlying message was “have a go”. Now I’d been knitting and making since I was a child, but this was the first time anyone had said it’s all yours for the taking, you don’t need permission, and you certainly shouldn’t be afraid of colour. Not that I was - my teenage bedroom in grey Stockport was lime green and purple - but this was like moving into an even brighter, more exciting Technicolor world. I have never looked back. And I’m proud to say that Kaffe wrote the blurb on the back of my first book.

Sarah Raven

[April 2023]

I must have read about Sarah in a newspaper because I booked on the very first course she ever ran, a day or two after the Labour landslide election in 1997. There was a great feeling of change, hope, and optimism, so maybe that was a part of it, the possibility of a new future of glorious colour and gorgeousness in the garden. I’d been growing tulips for a few years, but this day was an epiphany. Sarah’s approach, like Kaffe’s, is based on exuberance, quantity, range, more is more, and I immediately loved her “bold and brilliant” approach. Twenty-six years later, her taste in flowers (and vegetables) is still unmatched. And I still covet her tulips.

Marilyn Phipps

I met Marilyn in 1998. Again, I’d read a newspaper article about her amazing beachfront house and contacted her because it mentioned that she ran weekend courses. For many years, I spent a couple of weekends a summer there, in the company of wonderful people being taught by lovely tutors such as Julie Arkell, Linda Miller, Janet Bolton, Juju Vail, trying out all sorts of crafts and making. These were some of the most formative creative times I’ve ever had: I made my first quilt, I embroidered pictures, I discovered I don’t like papier mâché and that I am crap at watercolours.

But I was equally influenced by Marilyn herself who is the embodiment of the creative life. Marilyn is wonderfully talented (so many talents) but also a superb sharer of creative spirit and encouragement and the importance of making. Her taste - her whole way of life - is brilliantly joyful: bright nail varnish and flowery bathing caps and swimming in the sea, wine in the evening, fresh flowers on fresh cakes, and lots of laughter. Her home is a fabulous take on domesticity with wonderful collections of ordinary, everyday objects and there’s always energy for knitting, beading, painting, cooking, baking, table-setting, flower jug-filling. It’s there that I met Linda Litchfield who got me started with self-striping sock yarn goodness knows how many years and pairs of socks ago.

Nicola Beauman

[Persephone Books in Bath]

I’d read and loved Nicola’s A Very Great Profession a while before I came across Persephone Books in 2000 in an article in the Independent. My Mum and her mother, my Nana, were both great readers of domestic fiction and dedicated library users, and here were the exactly the sorts of books they’d borrowed and read - and then re-read in my Mum’s case as she adored every Persephone book I gave her. As for me, well it’s impossible to articulate how important the discovery was. Nicola’s books made it very clear that domesticity is a valuable, important subject of study; all these ordinary lives, details of housekeeping, furnishings, kitchens and gardens fascinated me, and gave me the confidence to not reject what I knew to be worth writing about.

We like to tell the story of how I plucked up all my courage - knowing Nicola’s high standards - and went into the shop and told her that I’d started writing a blog, to which she said, “what’s a blog?”. Nevertheless, once she’d seen what a/my blog was, her supportive email was the turning point for me to move from blog to book. Nicola’s amazing taste permeates everything she does, from the beautiful books themselves to the shop where everything speaks of considered good taste and good design: Thonet bentwood chairs, hand-made, hand-painted ceramics, old railway and film posters, Cryséde fabrics, warm lighting and cosiness in winter, fresh flowers all year round, and lovely textiles.

Laura Hart

[sourdough loaf, Laura’s recipe]

Hart’s Bakery is in under the arches at Bristol Temple Meads, one of my favourite stations. I’d read about Laura when she was making bread in a part-time micro-bakery, but had never managed to be in Bristol on a baking day. Now, though, I know better, and serious detour mileage has been made to go there eg just recently on the way to and from Cornwall. And it’s worth it, as every single thing sold in the bustling, busy bakery/cafe where the slogan above the door is ‘Eat More Gluten’ is delicious. Laura has some kind of genius for knowing what works with what, and never skimps on ingredients; her pasties are perfect and the Friday cheesecakes are fantastic.

Laura has also been a part of my home life for nine years. One of the best investments I ever made was a sourdough bread workshop at the the bakery; I came home knowing (and understanding) how to make a good sourdough loaf in a domestic kitchen plus a pot of her starter. The starter is still going, the mother of all my loaves, and I have continued to make bread Laura’s way. Even better, I passed on the knowledge and some starter to Tom, Alice and Phoebe, and we now regularly share flour ratios, shaping techniques, and endless photos of loaves. (No, not competitive at all.)

Merchant & Mills

[The Sunday dressing gown, Merchant & Mills]

I bought Merchant & Mills patterns in the early days, when they were printed on thick paper and rolled up into a tube. I’d seen immediately that the designs were my kind of thing - corporate life in my twenties confirmed that I was not made to deal with shoulder pads, high heels, anything double-breasted/dry-clean only, man-made fibres, and dress codes. I’d done some dressmaking as a teenager, but had lapsed, and now I really wanted to start again. I paid a visit to the Rye shop and made a couple of Strand coats very badly. It was too much, too soon. So I went back later to the newly expanded location, bought simpler patterns, did a couple of workshops (they are excellent), and now I can spot a Florence top at twenty paces.

Carolyn Denham and Roderick Field have superb taste, from designing the packaging for boxes of pins to selecting fabrics, from creating a range of easy-to-make/wear garments to the interior of the shop itself. They have transformed what I wear (favourites include the Factory dress, September coat, Ottoline jacket, Camber top) and vastly increased my sewing confidence. I honestly never thought I’d ever make a coat - let alone leave the house in it - and now I’ve made three. It is quite amazing to go out in public wearing something you have made, right down to the last dart and buttonhole.

Here’s to tulips and quilts, bread and books, homemade dresses and colourful homes. And newspapers, where great discoveries can be made.

Happy Sunday!