Hugo Rifkind on how not to decorate

Whether you inherit a tasteless mess or the home of a kindred spirit, decorating is always a disaster. Just say no...

© Ben Jennings

The ugliest place in which I ever lived was a flat decorated at vast and lavish expense in about 1981. This was in about 2002, though, and in the intervening years the place had suffered somewhat from a) a very hairy person dying there and nobody taking away their stuff, b) or hair, c) some manner of mould, which turned the bottom of the front wall green, d) an infestation of giant spiders from the tropical diseases clinic upstairs, e) the extermination of said spiders, apparently with some manner of gas that smelled like the London Zoo gorilla enclosure, f) the subsequent partial dusty decomposition of their giant, tropical, spidery bodies in every corner, nook and ledge, g) something blue and bleach-ish leaking throughout the kitchen cupboards, and h) nobody wanting to live in this skin-crawling horror-zone for at least a decade and a half. Until us.

Look, it was really central and really cheap. We rented it on the condition that we could paint the walls, which were a pink and purple floral theme. Bits of them couldn't actually be painted, however, on account of the way some of the pink and purple flowers weren't just painted on, but were actual protrusions, formed (yes) of fake flowers made out of pink and purple velvet and netting. The true horror, though, was the bathroom.

There was a carpet. No, wait, this isn't the good bit. It was grey and sticky, but this isn't the good bit, either. Parts of it, on either side of the toilet bowl, were worn away, due to somebody's incomprehensible habits. Only this, still, isn't the good bit. No, the good bit was that it wasn't just on the floor. It was also on the walls and the ceiling and the side of the bath.

Which meant that if you took a bath (and you'd want to, living here) and slumped backwards, your wet hair rested upon a sticky, grey, elephant-smelling carpet full of dead man's hair and spider corpses. We stayed longer than you'd have thought.

When we left, it was with a view to buy somewhere. This being a decade ago, London property was relatively reasonable, with a small two-bed flat costing only slightly more than either of us could expect to earn in our entire lives. We knew what we wanted. Light walls, stripped floors, some manner of open-plan kitchen. And lo, this was exactly what everywhere on sale looked like.

That should have set the alarm bells ringing. In fact, it was the bookshelves. I'd visit flats of the sort I wanted to buy, in the places I wanted to live, which were decorated as I'd want to decorate them, and there, on the bookshelves, would be all the books I already owned. In the first flat, it was odd. In the second, it was funny. By the third, though, I could feel my whole sense of self ebbing, ebbing, ebbing away. Never, quite, to return.

I don't like decorating. I don't mean the process; the wielding of a roll brush and the wearing of dungarees, because I'm quite good at that. I mean the conception. I remember, as a kid, going around to a friend's house and seeing that he'd covered the walls in pictures torn from magazines of rock stars and skateboarders. "Should I be doing this?" I wondered. It just seemed like so much work. So I didn't. When I went to university, my walls were largely bare. "You should put something up," people used to say. "But what?" I'd ask.

Thank God I have a wife to handle this stuff these days.

Decorating a house is like getting dressed, only the clothes cost all of your money and you need to wear them for a decade. No wonder men find it stressful. And the men who don't, really should. Few things are more depressing than the house of a man with money, who has been allowed to decorate it himself. They did a Through The Keyhole-thing with John Prescott last year, and his dining room looked like a civil service boardroom. I mean, the table even had plug sockets on it. Bleak as anything.

Occasionally, I've been into homes owned by the very, very rich.

Almost without exception, they look like hotels. You can feel the panic. "What's nice?" they're thinking. "Oh God, WHAT'S NICE?"

Octopuses, I read recently, are the only other creature to decorate their homes. Or lairs? Nests? Whatever. They use shells, mainly. And it made me wonder just how a human, devoid of all external influence, would do the same. I doubt there's any way to find out; you'd have to raise a child in a cellar for 18 years and then unleash him on Homebase; it wouldn't be OK. Still, you want to know what they'd do, right? And specifically, whether they'd carpet the bath.

Follow Hugo Rifkind on Twitter: @hugorifkind

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