Tastes

20 Sep 2004
Time: 01:25


Today I followed mom to her cousin's housewarming party. The usual story -- businessman in his mid 40s, made it big in his mid 30s, have 2 adolescent (childish) kids, a loud-simple-suspicious-bargain savvy in the morning market-wife, 2 cars and no dogs. Moved from a double-storey link house to a huge mansion of a banglo, which I will get to later.

Since we arrived early at grandma's, the entire clan had heated discussions about who's going into whose cars (the usual) and headed to the new township of Kota Damansara. We made a stop in front of Phase Goodness-knows-what that's currently done but still unoccupied and peeked and managed to enter an empty show house and salivated over the new design. Developers nowadays hire architects with better tastes, I tell you.

And then we actually made an unplanned detour to one of my aunt's friend's house nearby (different phase) and the entire clan noisily checked out her house. It was renovated tastefully and simply in British style with warm lightnings and fabric sofas and oak furnitures and strategic placing of build-ins. There's personal touches of artwork and...you can feel the love and thoughts that went into that house. Of course, I needn't neglect to say the MONEY dumped into renovations. More than RM 100k, I'm told.

Moving on. Mom's cousin's house. Huge banglo with 2 whatdyacallit Roman tiang. But the moment I entered the house, ugh, the dreadful awful feeling crept in. Ugly! The house screamed EXPENSIVE! MONEY! Huge huge plasma tv in a huge huge tv room with mismatched sofa sets. Huge huge wooden Chinese chair-and-table-set that's too hard to get cosy in. Impressive-but-garish kitchen. Yuck. That's all I can say to the house. The owner spent over RM1mil for the house, renovations and furniture but, God help me, it's impersonal, hollow and did I already mention garish?

So, the moral of the story is, money may buy health, friends, happiness and even power, but money sure can't buy taste.

Comments:
A visitor made this comment,
Get rich quick but no sense of style... hmm.. reminds me of someone
Andrew [andyrewchua@hotmail/yahoo.com]

Amelia made this comment,
Ahhh typical...don't mean to catergorise or judge but it's always like that. People who suddenly strike rich tend to go over the top. Show off. The house is always HUGE. The interior design in the house is always huge and expensive. But the ambience is NEVER cosy. Weird.

GenieOnTheLoose made this comment,
haih... why all the bling blings always goes to ppl who has no sense of design... it's pretty typical, especially in the chinese...i'm serious.
they shoiuld have paid u to be their interior decorator =P