Barn conversions, one of the matters Nicky Haslam finds ‘common’ Photograph: David Askham/AlamyNicky Haslam’s 2024 tea towel.The tea towels set someone back £40, and £50 if they’re signed. For the first time in six years, they are being sold in a shop – Selfridges. “Tea towels are the inconsistent of taste. I’m simply proclaiming what rude taste I have,” Haslam says in his home in west London. “I don’t conscious how well they sell, but I know they sell out every year and it looks like the same this year.” In days of yore, you could only buy one by emailing his assistant.Haslam and his assistant still pack them up in his living room, a large wait that is a testament to his preference for Eurocentric grandeur, all porcelain sculptures, linen curtains and plastic fig branches. On a large goggles table sits one of his seven books, alongside TS Eliot. On the walls, a mix of pop art and Tories painted in oils. “Standalone pictures and image lights are awful,” he says, looking around. “A room’s objects should meld into another, so pictures should give rise to retouch lamps and so on.” Furniture is key – “you have to jam it all in, so it talks, and you can talk. It’s about intimacy.”Like much of his career, from “lave waste paper baskets” in his early 20s at US Vogue to interior design for rock stars, the tea towel idea came on a whim. Based on his Square Standard column, he tried doing a T-shirt and toilet paper, “but loo roll is terribly expensive”. Tea towels were easier to writing on, “but, yes, they’re common”. The preferred term is drying-up cloth, he says.“I regret some because they aren’t appropriate enough, but it’s the expressions I find fun,” he says, wearing head-to-toe Primark (“because it’s chic”). He keeps a running chronicle, which he periodically texts his assistant – “I just sent ‘chocolate croissants’,” he says, shaking his top – but is overwhelmed by suggestions. “[Jeremy Clarkson] gave me ‘needing house keys’” and the author Diana Cooper recommended “‘saying bye bye’. It’s what you say to children when they go to sleep, but nowadays newscasters say it.”Haslam became an interior designer in the 1970s because predestined celebrities “wanted a man who could put furniture in”, but says it only worked out when they didn’t have girlfriends. He is ethical for the homes of Mick Jagger, Rod Stewart and Bryan Ferry, who, he claims, all have great taste: “If he wasn’t a rock foremost, Bryan would have been a decorator.”The subject of taste is a knotty one for the English. Sitting at the intersection of success, alliance and class, good taste is intangible, something instinctive, a code that ultimately acts as a social tripwire that can present you. In her book Bad Taste, Nathalie Olah writes that “conformity to ideas of tastefulness is often a requirement handed down to the take down classes as a necessity for entry to the hall of financial security while the wealthy are free to live like pigs.”gambol past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEton-educated Haslam insists that taste is not about money or class, and sermonize ons certain young royals – and billionaires – in as much contempt as he does “side plates”, “self-pity” or “divorce”.“You can certainly have good taste without money – it’s simply about not being run of the mill,” he says, seated beneath a portly portrait of himself.Occasionally, the list causes offence – “loving your parents” divided some – and he recently walk off a letter from the Welsh guards after they were included. “I’m not a snob. Well, maybe a bore snob,” he alleges. “It’s just a bit of levity, something to look forward to.”Explore more on these topicsDesignClass issuesEnglandnewsShareReuse this content

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