The Architecture of Happiness: Author interview - Exteriors - Homes

4 Is beauty truly in the eye of the beholder? Or are some things just plain ugly, no matter how you look at them?
Two attitudes towards beauty have taken hold in polite society. Firstly, it's said that the reasons why people have the tastes they do is essentially mysterious. It is as much beyond analysis why they should love a particular shape of sofa as why they should favour a particular kind of vegetable. Taste is described as a quasi-physiological phenomenon, beyond the realm of reason and discussion. Secondly, it's claimed that there is no such thing as good or bad taste. We may be able to determine more or less what a good law or car or education is, but when it comes to taste, the matter is a subjective one. Indeed, to try to define good taste could simply be an extreme example of snobbery and elitism.

However convincing these two arguments, I politely disagree with both of them. For a start, there is much we can say about why something might strike one as in good taste. Any object of design – be it a chair, or a sofa or a spoon – gives off an impression of the values it embodies and support, so that the interiors and buildings we admire are ultimately those which, in a variety of ways, extol values we think worthwhile. Our sense of beauty and our understanding of the nature of a good life are intertwined.

We can conclude from this that we are drawn to call something beautiful whenever we detect that it contains in a concentrated form those qualities in which we personally, or our societies more generally, are deficient. You'll call a nearly empty blank canvas beautiful when your own life is messy and your city chaotic. We call ‘good taste' a style which can move us away from what we fear and towards what we crave: a style which carries the correct dosage of our missing virtues.

5 What are some favourite items in your own home?
I am especially attached to my door handles. They were designed by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, in a house he did for his sister in Vienna. A modern German company now sells them: http://www.fsbusa.com/levers/1147

6 How can someone, the average person reading your book, apply your principles at home to create an environment that brings pleasure and contentment?
I'd love to leave my readers with a sense of how important design and architecture are.

For example, it's far from trivial to spend a long time arguing over a sofa or a plate. That's because a particular sofa can suggest a whole way of life, an attitude to existence, and it's really the struggle over what's meaningful and worthwhile that lies at the heart of people's disagreements in the aisles of home shops. Of an angular steel-legged sofa by a modern Italian design company like B&B Italia, a man might say, ‘I love this sofa', but really, he is drawn to qualities of order, logic and rationality, which this piece suggests to him. Meanwhile, his wife may kick up a fuss precisely because she hates all the sofa-like sides of her husband – and would love to infuse their marriage with the virtues of calm, sweetness and romanticism that she detects in a contrasting 18th century style chaise longue. The fights that unfold in furniture stores are hence entirely logical: a lot is truly at stake. We shouldn't feel embarrassed about going off someone because of their taste in sofas, or on someone because of their taste in mugs.