What Does “Too Taste Specific” Mean Anyway? :: Your Home is Your Home
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A client came to me yesterday with a photograph very similar to this one as one of his few inspiration images. The image is from Graham and Brown, the British wallpaper people. Further, the pattern is one by Umbra for Graham and Brown. The guy didn’t know where to start other than he wanted the feeling of that image interpreted and extrapolated over his entire open floor plan condominium. Perfect, this is just the kind of challenge I love. I asked him what it was about the photograph he liked so much. And without hesitation, he said, ” The wallpaper.”
So I started talking about wallpaper and how cool it is and how my great friend Given Campbell has some patterns he ought to see. He stopped me and said, “Oh I can’t use wallpaper.”
I reminded him that it was wallpaper that started our conversation and it was wallpaper that was so appealing to him. He went on to explain that he can’t use wallpaper in his home because it’s too “taste specific.” Mind you, this is a man who’d also told me he had no intention of selling any time soon. He was interested in making his house really his.
So when did making a home “taste specific” to the man who owns it become a bad thing? Isn’t my whole life spent helping other people make their homes taste-specific to them?
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Your Home is Your Home
It reminds me of a conversation I had with a woman about a year ago. Anyhow, she wanted to know if it’s OK to hang family photographs in the “public” areas of her home. I explained to her that hotels have public areas but homes don’t. She looked at me as if I were speaking Russian.
I hear things like that with shocking regularity. “I can’t do what I want because it’s what I like and nobody else will.” Or “I can’t leave too personal an impression in my living room.” Or “I drip a little vanilla extract on a light bulb every night, how do I keep it from leaving a stain?” How about “I want to paint my dining room a bright color but I’m worried about resale.” Has everyone become a home stager all of the sudden?
I know where all of this crap’s coming from. It’s that great Satan HGTV. I swear, they are the Fox News of the design press. Turn it off please. And leave it off.
Your home is your home and by virtue of the fact that you’re an adult, you get to do anything inside of it you want to do. Even if it’s stuff I find repugnant, who cares? I’m some guy with a big mouth in Florida, not some final arbiter and neither is anyone else. So go ahead. paint your walls with chalkboard paint, put a damn chicken coop in the backyard, hang exciting wallpaper. And for the love of God, stop asking for permission to put photos of your kids on the mantle.
If you’re going to put your house on the market sometime down the road, deal with it then but you can’t live your life for a potential buyer. And seriously, when is the last time you walked out of a house tour because someone had a perfectly painted red dining room? People walk out of house tours because the place is falling down. Gah!
Life’s over faster than anyone wants to admit. Leave a mark already.
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Note from the hosts:
I’d like to thank super-blogger Paul Anater for posting with us. I originally connected with the man formally known as @saintpetepaul on Twitter. Paul can currently be found @Paul_Anater. His don’t miss daily blog can be found here. This article originally posted there on May 13, 2010. ~ jb
Great post Paul!
I am going through the bland “neutral” nightmare now as our house is on the market. We have become stagers and I hate it!
My dearly beloved grandchildren’s pictures are packed, my cherished elephant sculpture collection is stored, my personal landscape photography wall gallery has been taken down, and and and. Apparently most home buyers can’t see beyond the decor and family pictures to visualize living in the home themselves.
We intend to make our next home our last home so you can bet on us putting our “mark” all over that place :-)
Thanks for the morning smiles.
Thanks Fran! It would kill me to have to remove myself from my own home in order to sell it and I know that’s the conventional wisdom. My question is, has anyone ever studied if these depersonalization techniques work? I suspect the answer is no. I’m willing to believe otherwise but I need to see some proof. Good luck with your home sale and wallow in the you-ness of your new place when you get there.
I was considering putting my house on the market so I had the real estate agent who sold it to me to come by to see the changes I’d made and give me a ballpark figure on what I’d likely get for it in current condition. As soon as she walked in the door I mentioned that I was planning to paint my gorgeous chocolate brown accent wall the same neutral as the rest of the walls in the room. I was shocked when she said I shouldn’t. When I asked why not, wasn’t it too taste specific?, she replied that in real estate language, “too taste specific” is a nice way to say “too freakin’ ugly” and that as along as it’s actually tasteful you should leave your home as you live in it (but cleaner).
Wow Alison, that is one unusual agent! Sign that contract!
This post struck a chord with me, so much so that I referenced it in a post of my own over the weekend. And, not surprisingly, several other people are just as confounded as I was by your client who couldn’t put wallpaper in his house.
I’m always shocked and amazed how caught up people get with the nefarious “they” when they should be more concerned with “I” when decorating their homes.
Great post!
Nicole: Thanks for agreeing with me!
About all I can do is add a most fervent amen to what you’ve said. We moved into our home some eighteen years ago. I worked at an escrow company at that time, and one of my co-workers was a part-time realtor. She was appalled when I told her I was going to bang out the wall between two small bedrooms and convert them into one large study. You’ll have fewer bedrooms, she gasped. That really impacts the re-sale value. But, hey, it’s our home, and we get to make it anyway that pleases us, right?
Interestingly enough, this house had some veined mirror tiles in the living room, which we absolutely hated. The house was completely vacant when we first saw it, but maybe, in the context of the living room as they had it arranged, that large mirror (about 4’x5′) made perfect sense. But it did not fit into our plans for the home, so I removed it, a process that consumed about half a day to carefully get the glass tile off without breaking it and to spackle the resulting drywall damage. But those mirrors certainly did not keep us from making the purchase.
Since then we have converted a four-bedroom house into essentially a one-bedroom house, as my wife and I are childless. Two bedrooms became this study; the third became a bonus room that is on its way to becoming my wife’s home office. All three closets in these rooms have been converted to alcoves. And so forth. Will it impact the re-sale value? Without a doubt. But for all these years we have lived in a house that suits us, and that’s what it’s all about. And, in any case, that re-sale nonsense just requires a bit of marketing. We’re certainly not the only childless couple, so you simply go downtown and market the house to professional people.