There’s great joy to be found in loo rugs and pale green bathrooms

Apparently, according to respondents in a recent poll, the greatest “interior design crime” of recent times has been the horror-show that is (or rather was; I haven’t seen any this side of the 20th century) the shagpiled, U-bend-hugging, germ-harbouring “toilet rug” and its corresponding (cosy) loo-seat cover.

I can’t see too many people disagreeing with that, yet the top 10 list of “crimes” – selected from a list drawn up by design writers – makes for an eclectic House of Horrors. Alongside Artex (ugh), stone cladding (ugly) and ragrolling (never as good as in the TV programmes), the list includes taxidermy (bafflingly, as it’s a current hipster fave) and tribal carvings/masks/wallhangings (hipster-ditto) and the (now entirely upturned) cliché of the avocado bathroom suite. Although any stylish skip-botherer will tell you that a pale green bathroom is currently le dernier cri in grooviness among those who, if not busy bathing in them, will take their avocados any which way but preferably smashed.

While it’s also an unsurprising no-no for waterbeds (I once bounced on Hugh Hefner’s, but that’s another story), it’s a thumbsdown too for chintzy furniture, which, arguably, is having a moment – albeit in a boho-british, eclectic way as opposed to Nanny’sfavourite-armchair style.

Surveys such as these ultimately reveal little more than the tedious tyranny of soi disant “good” taste, the definition of which is of course a joyfully mutable thing. We’ve had a couple of decades of the diktat of white-on-white, followed by anything-as-long as-it’sgreige (thank you, Kelly Hoppen), which, in turn, segued into 50-plus shades of grey (now, quite literally, revealed to be the elephant in the room).

As a newly-qualified interior designer with a penchant for navy blue ceilings, I’m personally delighted that nambypamby neutrals are out and big, bold colours and uncompromising patterns are back. Not yet peach, granted, though it can only be a matter of time.

Clearly, fashions in interiors are cyclical. Yet, while the cork flooring in my own bedroom may be directly inspired by my Sixties/seventies childhood (a happy collision of cork and hessian, itchy natural floorcoverings and William Morris prints), choosing embossed orange vinyl wallpaper for the bathroom would feel like a midcentury homage too far.

And yet, as one half of the population scoffs at loo rugs and bead curtains, coloured bathroom suites and Abigail’s Party-style bars in the living-room, the other half may be thinking: “Hmm, I can work with that.”

Lest we forget, coloured bathroom suites reflected the increasingly sophisticated tastes of the first generation of the middle classes habitually to travel abroad on holiday. And the much-maligned loo carpet was practical when central heating was still a luxury and bathrooms of all stripes – stately or semi – had only just come in from the outdoor cold and were, as result, invariably freezing.

I grew up with neighbours with an outside loo and no bathroom, who washed in the kitchen in a metal bath. And this was north-west London in the Seventies. You may recall, meanwhile, Ikea urging us to “chuck out the chintz” in the 1980s. I was in Ikea a fortnight ago and you couldn’t move for funky florals. How soon – and how snobbily – we forget.

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