Quietly Understated

Interior design? I'll tell you everything I know. Walls should be white and carpets should be green or, occasionally, terracotta. Then you can put pictures on the white walls. The green is restful and the terracotta is warm. Varnished floorboards look good but are a bit noisy. Have lots of bookshelves.

That's it for the interior design bit. And now, furniture.

The furniture should be carefully chosen to complement the above. Unlike ours which is a complete mixture of styles and colours. But ours has history, though not quite the same kind of history as, say, the furniture at Chatsworth. We have the big old sideboard which was dumped outside the Communist's chemist shop in about 1980, which he subsequently painted with gloopy varnish. We have the table which belonged to the old woman with one leg who lived in the flat above us in Cardiff, who had the dog which never left the flat (all possible imaginings which that conjures up were true). We have the rather wonky dining chairs which we bought as a temporary measure in about 1985 and never replaced. Only recently have we got rid of the coffee table which we bought from the Post Office in Cardiff for £2.25. I suppose furniture just can't be that important to me, or I would have done something about it all years ago.

The decor I enjoy most all year is at Park Hotel, Tenby, where we've been many times, where Emily and Gareth are getting married, and which doesn't know the meaning of subtle:

They also have a truly naff website (though if you click on The View you can see one reason why we keep going back there). But a website's not really a Park Hotel kind of a thing. The idiosyncratic cheery decor is entirely symptomatic of an idosyncratic cheery place. There's a place for Tasteful, and this isn't it.