A tale I heard
Interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen on his biggest life lesson:
"One of the biggest epiphanies I ever had was very public. It was that moment on Changing Rooms in the Nineties when one of the ladies opened her eyes and was absolutely appalled by what I’d done to her living room. Suddenly, the show hit the headlines. I was not expecting this cataclysmic disapproval. People were saying: ‘How could you do that to someone? How could you take their poor, innocent living room and Queen Anne-ify it?’.
There was something in the back of my mind saying, ‘Well, she did ask for it. It was literally what she wanted’. But I felt that I couldn’t say that. I spent four or five days trying to weather the storm. Yet when the show went out, people got in touch to say, ‘Actually, I really like that, and I don’t understand why she didn’t like it’.
It was the moment in my life when I realised there’s no such thing as good taste — or bad taste. It’s ‘your taste’ and ‘my taste’, and I had to accept that."
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