When Too Much Of A Good Thing Is Not Good

The theme of a homily that my favorite priest, Father Greg, recently delivered in church was "Money can build a house, but only love can build a home." It was an inspiring sermon, not boring at all like most homilies tend to be.

Even before his last word could fade in the halls of church – eureka! An idea crossed my mind. Instead of money versus love in building a home, what I want to focus on are the differences between two dwellings: One home is achieved by the power of great wealth but is tacky while another is oozing with beauty and built by one who has exquisite taste instead of a huge amount of money.

One may wonder how money can indeed produce unattractiveness and not beauty. To this, I say: Too much of a good thing, most often, is not good at all. I remember a brief era when a handful of ladies suddenly in possession of money went into buying sprees and emptied the stores of Muslim vendors purveying Chinese porcelains smuggled through the backdoors of the country. The sellers and buyers never had it so good that a rivalry was soon raging. The bigger the pieces, the better, they thought. Hence humongous and multi-color burial jars (fired the day before) dwarfed many a living room. With their limitless money, most ended up building bigger, palatial homes to house the ladies’ expanding collections.

Money breeds copycats and one need not look far to witness proof of this. Magazine pictorials often show homes in their magical splendor. When the people behind these pictorials peep through the viewfinder they discover something has to be added on the coffee table to improve the composition. In some cases the homeowner is requested to lend her favorite object to add texture to the whole picture. Nowadays you see the whole gamut of crystals or porcelains displayed on coffee tables, arranged in a contrived manner that they make the homeowners look like they are retailing Laliques and Bacarats.

Every item of furnishing or accessory can only look good if it is presented in a proper setting. We have a very nice lady friend who was sweet-talked into buying a piece of "Filipino furniture." A clever lady decorator had organized a sale of furniture in her newly completed residence. Word had gotten around the village so one fine weekend, hordes trooped to the private invitational viewing/sale where all that could go were daintily marked for sale. My eager friend took the bait and went to what she deemed to be a rare occasion. Lo and behold, she fell for a piece – not quite a side or an altar table. It might have looked handsomely divine in the seller’s living room but charity will not influence me to say that it does something to my naive friend’s home. The woody ruggedness of the piece is hardly what harmonizes well with her immaculate marbled floor and femininely curtained French window to boot! Do you see the picture?

Intimate and well-meaning friends have confronted me with the question, "How would you describe a person with good taste?"

I confess I do not have a fixed answer but I can enumerate some qualities. One is that this person is not easily persuaded by an ongoing fad or a passing fancy. If she truly has good taste, she will have the good mind to figure out if what she is seeing on display at a showroom will jive with or will be in contrast with what she already has at home.

Here’s another way to tell: To call oneself rich is already in bad taste but to quote prices of your priced objects is definitely tackier. The other evening I almost fell off my Lazy Boy upon hearing this hunk of a businessman loudly classifying and pronouncing himself as rich. I was further shocked when his equally boastful wife proudly announced that the figurine in front of them cost her half-a-million pesos a few years back. She further offered that today it would surely fetch at least P800,000.

A sit-down dinner is one of the most elegant affairs any hostess can dream of. With the fast turnover of household help, one is left with new help that still don’t know the difference between a wine glass from a water glass. Unless you are certain they will not commit unpardonable faux pas during that dream dinner, set the table accordingly and after it’s ready, do the buffet table.

This done, you can now announce that dinner is served. After finding their place cards on the table, guests can lift their salad plates to fetch the crispy salad waiting for them at the buffet. The rest of the courses can be enjoyed in the same fashion. I think this is the best way for the hostess to avoid losing her poise and cool. We’ve barely scratched the surface but I promise we’ll have more of this in the issues to come.

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