It’s tough to talk about taste in interiors: We all have it, but we’re seldom offered room to explore it at length. I notice this when I talk to the people around me about the furniture they live with: People get cagey and defensive when pressed to express what it is they like or want out of their living spaces, as if their home is incidental, or something that has happened to them. They might feel comfortable – even confident – as they slip into their favourite band’s merch before heading out to a bar, but the idea of discussing the bed in which they wake up each day is almost too personal. It can be incredibly vulnerable to discuss the home, or your home specifically. A few years ago, Rachel Cusk probed into the quiet domestic discomfort of having friends and family over, noting, “At home, everywhere I looked I now seemed to see a hidden part of myself that was publicly exposed”.
Instead, we often excuse our taste, then outsource it to our aspirations: To upmarket flat-pack catalogues from which we won’t order, to remodeling vlogs on YouTube and to the infinite scroll on TikTok or Instagram. I’d argue this is an unconscious choice, but a choice nonetheless – it’s easier and less revealing to talk of aspirations and what we could or would have if things were different than it is to initiate the change we might privately covet. This gap between what we want and what we think we can have is expansive by design – this I know to be true, as I was once one of the architects of these aspirations.
In my early 20s, I was one of a handful editors around the world working at the crossroads of lifestyle and architecture aesthetics. We’d trawl our inboxes for press releases from architects, design firms and PRs, then rate images based on how they might perform on Instagram. The appetite of our audiences was enormous: One account I managed grew tenfold after my first year’s work, and we regularly crowded Instagram’s Explore page with pretty little pictures of pretty little buildings.
Originality mattered very little, and publishers cribbed high-performing posts from one another without worry as long as we credited the architects, designers and photographers. I don’t know that any of us were paid enough to care, anyway. We weren’t used to inhabiting the spaces we continually ratified into the digital canon of taste. In fact, the contrast between the what we posted and how we lived was so striking it seemed obvious: In the morning, I’d sort through the multi-million dollar remodels in my inbox and in the afternoons, I’d blog about French brutalism, or Art Deco diners. Then in the evening, I’d return to my room in a shared flat so forsaken by our landlord that I’d had to MacGyver a toilet flush arm out of dental floss. You could see the feeds I managed as a form of escapism. Or, you could see them as my job.
This kind of work exposed a contradiction in taste, and one that I’ve often revisited in the years since. Once, I went to meet a marketing manager from a boutique flat-flipping agency we’d featured. I’d found the remodels generic and devoid of character, but they did well on Instagram, and he was charming – unflappable, even. He passed me fliers for flats his agency had brought to the market and chattered on about how similar our jobs were, actually. “We’ve got something for you,” he assured me. “What’s your budget – 750€?” I paused, unsure if I should disclose exactly how much of my month’s wages I’d be shelling out for rent. Then I realised the full scale of his miscalculation: He was speaking in the hundreds of thousands with the ease and candor of someone who dealt with those sums often. If I had that money, I thought, surely I’d buy something better. I turned to face him, then smiled and showed myself out.
The thing about taste is that it’s informed by a wealth of factors but it doesn’t need to be limited by them as well. Furniture For All is my invitation to you to explore your taste, whatever it may be and wherever it may take you. I have no interest in invigilating taste – I’m in no place to say mine is any better, more important or more interesting than anyone else’s. I’ve done it before, and it’s less fun than it looks. Taste is a personal thing, and one we could all enjoy a great deal more.
Instead, I’m interested in understanding my taste, and providing the groundwork for others to do the same. When people ask after the lessons I’ve learned from running Furniture For All, I point them to the language of furniture – a language that fascinates me as I endeavour to understand its history, its structure, its context and its current application in a market where “teak” is both a type of wood from a type of tree, and a general search term for things that are brown and pretty. If you’re not sure where to start, here are just a few inroads worth following.
You might not know it by name, but you’ll know its face: Nathan Furniture is one of the most visually distinctive brands on the U.K. market. Each piece is scored by the same beveled waffling as seen in the sideboard above, which is available in Preston for £195. The many mid-century makers come with their own idiosyncratic styles and languages. They can be mixed and matched as you like, or you can choose to find corresponding pieces from the same family as your taste and home evolve.
If you’re shopping for DDR furniture, the phrase “VEB” should sound familiar. It’s frequently attached to everything from vases to wardrobes, including the one above (available in Berlin for 210€). This abbreviation doesn’t connote a single style or maker or even a shared source. Instead, it stands for Volkseigener Betrieb, a legal classification for industrial productions in East Germany. When available, pay attention to these labels on these pieces as they’ll clue you into where the piece once was – the wardrobe above traveled around 200 kilometers from Quedlinburg to Berlin, for example.
I’m not a DJ, but I do take requests: I’m always happy to help find furniture, so let me know what you’re looking for. Reply to this email or send me a message on Twitter what you want, where you are (generally! don’t send me your address – I don’t want it!), and what price point fits your budget, and I’ll see what I can do.
You’d be forgiven if you mistook the sideboard above for Nathan Furniture – as I said before, many of the mid-century makers worked with designs that can be mixed and matched as you’d like. Here, we have a piece from McIntosh, a Scottish brand originally from Kirkcaldy, Fife. The company’s history is rich, and its portfolio is massive and exhaustive, with an abundance of models still in circulation. McIntosh remains a popular brand, and one that’s relatively affordable – the mint-condition piece above is available for £450 in Llanelli, Wales.
Now here’s the real test: These two storage units are available in North Somerset for £35 apiece. But which maker made them? Find out for yourself here.