Stephen Bayley Quotes

I just don’t understand how you can not be concerned about your appearance. From time to time I’m vilified as the person who cares about the look of a teapot – and it’s not that I believe my taste is superior, I just can not believe that other people don’t care.

Watteau is no less an artist for having painted a fascia board while Sainsbury’s is no less effective a business for producing advertisements which entertain and educate instead of condescending and exploiting.

I wouldn’t mind someone lobbing hand grenades at me, but having to reset the timer on the video recorder puts me into a blood-spitting frenzy.

While there is a great value in things that are old, it seems that the overwhelming challenge in Britain in the late 20th century is to make every effort to see value in the contemporary and in the future.

It is sometimes easier to have furniture made than to find things.

It is the fragrant lack of practicality that makes high-heeled shoes so fascinating: in terms of static mechanics they induce a sort of insecurity which some find titillating.

I have no particular interest in antiquities or antiques, but I like things to meet a certain aesthetic.

I just don’t understand how you can not be concerned about your appearance. From time to time I’m vilified as the person who cares about the look of a teapot – and it’s not that I believe my taste is superior , I just can not believe that other people don’t care.

In an age robbed of religious symbols, going to the shops replaces going to the church. We have a free choice, but at a price. We can win experience, but never achieve innocence. Marx knew that the epic activities of the modern world involve not lance and sword but dry goods.

Interior design is a travesty of the architectural process and a frightening condemnation of the credulity, helplessness and gullibility of the most formidable consumers – the rich.

You must never aspire to ‘finish’ a house, you can merely hope to start it, and from then on it’s an evolutionary process.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

I have a character failing. I am quite incapable of identifying with anything whole-heartedly. Whatever I am doing, I am always planning to do something else. I would rather travel than arrive.

The assumption must be that those who can see value only in tradition, or versions of it, deny man’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances.

I have put [the word] “discoveries” in inverted commas because scientific results, perhaps as much at least as artistic achievements, are a product of contemporary taste, driven by momentary appetites rather than eternal verities.