Home Decorating, Paint Colors
and Your Taste

Home decorating, paint colors selection and similar creative activities allow you to express your unique taste... or reveal your confused judgement. So here are a few thoughts about what constitutes good style...

When it comes to decorating with color and paint, you wear your taste on your sleeve.

Some people are surrounded by good taste from birth. They usually have a natural flair for decorating, paint colors selection and furniture arrangement, and can create a balanced home color design without knowing very much about form, line, or hue.

Others acquire a sense of discrimination from teachers and knowledgeable individuals.

Still others improve their taste by observation and awareness.

And anyone willing to spend time studying examples of good taste can acquire it.

If you happen to be one of those people with flair, be glad of it. If not, don't be too discouraged.

This website will help you understand why certain paint color combinations look good (or bad) and what makes a successful home color scheme work.

Tastes, Fads and Styles

Your taste is the sum-total of your likes and dislikes. Good taste, however, is defined in Webster as:

"the power of discerning and appreciating fitness, beauty, order, congruity, proportion, symmetry, or whatever constitutes excellence..."

Looking back over the centuries since man began to build houses and create decorations for them, there have been periods of good and bad taste.

For example, history has put the stamp of approval on the cultures of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. The periods of Louis XV and Louis XVI and the designs of the Georgian period in England are rated high from the standpoint of beauty and good taste.

And even now, taste is always in a state of flux because new designs are constantly being created.

There is, however, a world of difference between a fad and a sound style. The former usually "catches on" overnight, enjoys a quick success, and is soon replaced by another fad. A lasting style develops out of what has preceded it, and gradually assumes its proper importance in the evolution of fashion.

Nostalgia plays an important role in the taste of many people. It accounts for the popularity of traditional or period decoration which represents a harking back to the "good old days".

Many people's taste runs to traditional furniture, decorating, paint colors of a particular period. Such classic taste, though correct in every aspect, can produce rooms which lack the imprint of personality.

Other people, wanting to break with tradition, find expression for their taste in a choice of modern designs. Still another group likes a mixture of modern and traditional.

If you look at the styles of the past, as well as contemporary designs, with an appraising and thoughtful eye, accepting what you consider is right for your way of life and rejecting what is not, you will soon come to be recognized as a person of taste.

Such a discerning eye for home decorating and paint colors is not acquired overnight, but once you acquire it, the world in which you live will take on new significance.

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