Design critic Stephen Bayley: Is there such a thing as good taste?

"Taste, taste, taste!" the architect Frank Lloyd Wright once moaned. "Cows have taste!"  Yes they do, but only in a limited sense. Wright meant his own designs transcended taste, but they did not. There’s really no escaping it.

Once upon a time, long ago, spittle-flecked enthusiasts would present me with a Danish fish platter and, with the zeal of a prophet announcing a divine revelation, would say, "This is good design!" I would shrug and reply, "Well, maybe it is, but what you really mean is: this is my taste." Taste is the mechanism we use to determine our preferences.

It’s a mixture of inherited proclivities and acquired yearnings. It’s how we read others and how they read us. And it’s deadly.  Sex and money were once taboo in polite conversation. Alas, no longer. People are all too willing to tell you more than you need to know about their romances and finances.

Taste remains the final border of personal shame because it is so revealing. To a degree, we are the sum of what we wear, what we drive, what we eat and, of course, where we live. But it’s a maddeningly elusive subject. As soon as you accept that our preferences are influenced by external factors, then all certainties begin to wobble.

Is there any such thing as "the best"? Is your taste worse than mine? Who says? Is all of existence a relativist jumble? If we can get to the bottom of this we will be close to understanding that fundamental question that has dogged philosophers for centuries: exactly why do hairstyles change?

1  Donald Trump’s throne

The president conducted his first post-election interview on a gold throne in the style of Louis XIV. High above Fifth Avenue, he sat  in an apartment that  was a demented replica of Versailles. Earlier, when discussing the gilt, glass and marble of Trump Tower, he had explained, "I like hard, shiny things."

2  David Cameron’s kitchen

We saw it often on the news. What was the precise meaning of those bottles of oil, aprons, jars of spices and tongs? They say: despite my elite education, I am a practical man. I can make vinaigrette. I am in touch with my appetites and unafraid to reveal my artisan inclination and put on a pinny to whip up a salad dressing.

I am down with the wife and kids and friends for a "kitchen supper" (a term of toxic superiority, suggesting that the formal dining room is not, on this occasion, being employed). This taste for what the French call "nostalgia for the mud" was confirmed when the ex-PM moved into a fake shepherd’s hut – the 21st-century Petit Trianon.

3  Sir Terence Conran’s salad bowl

The founder of Habitat was infatuated with France in the 1970s, or at least an Englishman’s misty-eyed vision of it. For Terence Conran, it was only a short step from wanting to cook ratatouille to wanting a Provençal kitchen to cook it in.

Thus England was introduced to la vie rustique: a vision of perfection in a wooden salad bowl. Conran believed, possibly quite correctly, that owning one would enhance existence. Roquette salad came later.

4  Elsie de Wolfe’s  white paint

Elsie de Wolfe – who introduced new money to old French furniture – had a motto about decoration: "Plenty of optimism and white paint." And when she saw the Parthenon she said, "It’s beige! My colour!"

Preferred colours of paint are always revealing. Today, there are entire villages on the north Norfolk coast that have surrendered to the chalky palette of Farrow & Ball. A door painted in Mouseback now has the same value, in terms of social promotion, once attached to a chiffonnier with ball-and-claw feet.

5 Le Corbusier’s bathroom

Here is the Swiss-French architect, patron saint of brutalism, advocate of flyovers and high-rise, of concrete and metal, who thought a house was a machine for living in. Yes, said Frank Lloyd Wright, but only if you think the human heart is a mere pump.

Le Corbusier’s contemporary, Marcel Duchamp, had presented a urinal as a work of art. In sympathy, Corbu thought a tap was a thing of beauty. This homage to plumbing – which anticipated Richard Rogers and the hi-tech vogue of the ’70s – was the best memorial of  The Machine Age.

6 Elizabeth David’s basil and garlic

The discovery of exotic ingredients and the faddish observation of culinary lore were part of Britain’s post-war recovery, a process still not complete. Mrs David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food in 1950 introduced her countrymen to oil, garlic and lemon.

She said even to speak these words then was to experiment with pornography. She insisted you should only ever tear basil, and garlic should be smashed with a flat blade. This absurd snobbery endures still.

7 Sir John Betjeman’s teddy bear (the model for TV’s Brideshead’s bear)

Soft toys are always kitsch since they suggest and offer surrogate emotions. The Poet Laureate revered the moth-eaten Archie in a theatrical relationship that made all fastidious aesthetes cringe.

But the teddy was just the symbol of Betjeman’s larger belief system: he was the source of an enduring cult devoted to soft focus, counterfactual, retro-kitsch fantasies. And the end result of this is the writer AN Wilson riding a sit-up-and-beg bike with a wicker basket.

8 William Morris:  the guilty man

The massive inertia in English taste and its source in anti-industrial medieval soft porn we owe to William Morris, an entitled genius whose fine principles were sometimes at odds with his practices. Morris was dismayed by the dehumanising effects of 19th-century industry and looked for democratic liberation in handicraft, apparently unaware that his furnishings were beyond the reach of most.

9  Do you like my plates?

Buyer’s remorse is a psychological reality of the modern world and so too is consumer fear: as Karl Marx knew, the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword, but dry goods. This means your friends are sniggering at your plates. Ikea or Oka? Perhaps John Lewis? Sèvres? The fascination of the contemporary world is that no choices are innocent, every decision betrays you.

10 The wickedness of flying ducks

Ceramic (or plaster) flying ducks, often arranged in a flight of three and at a jaunty angle, were a popular decoration, contemporary with Tretchikoff’s print The Chinese Girl (by some measures the most popular work of art ever).

In 1960, a flight of ducks appeared in Elsie Tanner’s house at 11 Coronation Street and later migrated to Hilda Ogden’s. Flying Ducks became so much the irredeemable evidence of lower-middle-class taste, they have not even enjoyed an ironic re-uptake by hipsters. And perhaps never will.

Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things, by Stephen Bayley, is published by Circa (£29.95). To order your copy for £24.99 with free p&p call  0844 -871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk