Can “Taste” Be Unique?

Photo by Michael Proulx, courtesy Design Research.

To mark its redesign, Curbed published Home Sweet Home, a collection of thoughts by 30 personalities on what home means to them. My contribution below.

Deeney: Everyone thinks that they’ve got good taste. Everyone thinks “Everyone thinks that they’ve got good taste, but I have got good taste …” (Pause) But I have got good taste.

My husband went to David Mamet’s play, The Old Neighborhood, on Broadway in 1997. When he got home he said, “David Mamet is talking about people like you.” But I refused to take it as criticism. I have got good taste, my mom has good taste, my grandma had good taste (my other grandmother had good taste too, but different good taste).

This is my proof.

In my first house, purchased by my parents in Cambridge, Mass. in 1974 for the low low price of $50,000, I played with unpainted wooden blocks, I ate off Massimo Vignelli’s stackable melamine Heller plates, I sat on a blond wood directors chair, I lounged on a geometric rug from Mexico and I slept under a blue Marimekko Puketti duvet. My parents toasted with Ultima Thule and had dinner parties with international foods from Merry White’s Cooking for Crowds by the light of an oversized paper lampshade. Sometimes I was allowed to stay up late to serve the hummus with pita triangles.