Are you an aesthete?

How important are colors and beauty to you in everyday life? Do you put a lot of attention into your surroundings and take pleasure in how they are decorated?

Do you have a personal style of decoration?

I don't think so. I care about things like clothes and I put pictures on my walls etc, but I don't get bothered by untidiness or the general layout of rooms etc.

Didn't you have the "Man Who Fell to Earth" Wallpaper at one point?

I do still...it was in my flat when I moved in though. I guess I'd say I appreciate anything looking well but only in some things do I really feel the need to control this. If I had more money things might be different.

I don't exert too much aesthetic control over my environment, but contemplation of the aesthetics of my everyday reality consume a significant amount of my time and energy.

How important are colors and beauty to you in everyday life?

They're very important to me. I find that an alarming number of environments that I happen to pass through are tragically designed...which I can only think has deleterious psychological and physical effects for people who spend time in them.

I was visiting my mom this past week and was reminded once again of how the decor and, well, pretty much everything about her house stands in violent opposition to every principle of feng shui.

On a related note, my parents were/are not insane, but one could be forgiven for thinking so upon entering the room that served as my bedroom when I was growing up. The wallpaper and carpet are both of very, very LOUD designs which also completely clash with each other. I guess the idea was to make a "fun" room for a young boy, but the overall effect is more akin to that of an art installation designed to inspire hallucinations sans drugs.

Do you put a lot of attention into your surroundings and take pleasure in how they are decorated?

Not as much as I could, but that is probably good because it means that I am managing some balance in that area instead of being perfectionistic , which for me anyhow seems to inevitably result in some boomerang slobbiness effect.

Do you have a personal style of decoration?

Minimal, calming. Dignity, simplicity, greenery, inspiration.

Serious 70s vibe in my pad right now. Feels GREAT.

How important are colors and beauty to you in everyday life?

I come fairly close to having the renaissance era belief that bad colors and proportions are physically injurious to the eye.

Do you put a lot of attention into your surroundings and take pleasure in how they are decorated?

yes, although I don't care for the term 'decorated'

Do you have a personal style of decoration?

I am happy with many different styles, although I imagine that my core beliefs and approach carry through all of them to some extent.

I would say yes definitely (I'm also a synaesthete :) )

I put this down to some extent to the rest of my slightly neurotic tendencies - generally if something is 'out of place' in certain ways I automatically focus on it and can't ignore it - like a wonky picture, I have to correct it otherwise the back of my mind constantly goes back to that. If I see a spelling or punctuation mistake it 'looks wrong' and jumps out at me; same with ill-fitting clothes on someone - it looks 'wrong'; if there's a sock lying on the floor in my room it bugs me till I pick it up; same with wrong aspect-ratio on the TV, everything.

I'm not particularly artistic so luckily noticing horribly decorated rooms etc is only to a basic degree (my OH notices all kinds of things, but works in a creative industry where he's highly attuned to all kinds of aesthetic things). We are currently re-decorating our flat quite drastically so I'm noticing things even I wouldn't normally notice. I'm also finding that I have weird pickiness over certain things that I had never thought about.

Oddly enough today I was thinking about my neighbour downstairs whose flat is constantly full of crap, to a really bad degree (food on the floor - not just dropped there, actually put there to keep it there - and she has cats) and it really smells. I think I would be constantly depressed or frustrated if I had to live like that.

Didn't think I was until I bought a house. Now I'm obsessed with design. Must investigate feng shui.

this is a v. loose def'n of 'aesthete' yo.

was going to say.

To me, the perfect aesthete is and forever will be Huysmans' Des Esseintes in "A rebours". And each time I find myself wondering if I'm an aesthete or not, I just have to think about him to find out I'm VERY FAR from being one !

I don't think being an aesthete need have much to do with interior decoration. I have never done any interior, or indeed exterior, decoration in my life, but would still tend to call myself an aesthete, at least if someone wearing a green carnation grabbed me, slammed me up against a nearby red telephone box and rasped his smouldering desire to know whether or not I was one.

I have a strange aspie sense of interior decoration in that I don't like wallpaper or wallcoverings of any sort, just painted walls. And for my bedroom I like white walls for whatever reason. I like having pictures hanging but apart from that I don't like anything in a room that does not have a practical purpose at all. i.e. no ornaments, vases, side-tables that are not absolutely necessary, candles, cushions etc.