Taste Matters: the Secret Ingredient of Great Hospitality

Yesterday I went to the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin.

Walking through those galleries, surrounded by work that feels fearless and alive, hit me again: if you want to create something truly good (an artwork, music, a hotel), you need taste.

I now see taste as the major prerequisite for any great project.

You can look at direct references and scroll through the usual places (Pinterest, ArchDaily), and study other hotels.

The obvious problem is that you risk training your brain on something average. It’s hard to discover YOUR taste amid tons of someone else’s vision or repurposed material.

Sometimes it can even be damaging.

Your visual “vocabulary” becomes a remix of the same average, safe, overused ideas everyone else is copying. You don’t notice it at the time, but you slowly lose the ability to imagine anything truly outside that echo chamber.

I see a lot of boring hotels and homes.

I see some that have good bones and good intentions, yet they’re still terribly boring because the designer (or the artist) was too afraid and stayed inside a box of self-imposed constraints.

I now look at the homes we once created and think they’re awfully boring too. Back when we were designing them, I genuinely thought we had made little pieces of art. Now I perceive them as beginner art that looks cute, at most.

So how do you develop great taste?

I don’t really know yet - I don’t believe I have great taste myself. I’m still very much in the process of developing it.

I see it as a muscle you build over time through submission to great art… and then rebellion.

Something I’ve found useful is becoming a temporary fanatic of one artist you love.

You pick one, research them, study them, understand them, mimic them from A to Z until you can predict their next move before they make it (or, if they’re no longer alive, the move they never got to make).

Until their logic feels like your own native tongue.

Then, the moment you realize you’ve become one with them, it’s time for rebellion. You take everything you absorbed and consciously violate their rules in the most elegant way possible.

I believe true taste emerges exactly in that act - when you know precisely why something should not work and yet you make it sublime anyway.

Now imagine you’ve done this repeatedly with different artists from different eras.

Eventually you build, develop, or invent something that is no longer mediocre. And years later it might look mediocre to you again - which simply means your taste keeps growing along with you.

Back to the museum

One reason I love art museums (maybe a bit too much) is that they feed the artistic side that’s so crucial when you create businesses/hospitality projects.

You stand in front of artists from different centuries, each with their unique way of seeing, feeling, and expressing.

You see protests hanging on the walls, like this banana painting:

You admire tiny details:

And sometimes you find immersive stations you can experience yourself and grab an idea or two to make an artistic station for yourself, your child or your guest less boring:

And from all those bits and pieces, something stands out, something speaks directly to you, and you take it home - to your space, your hospitality project, your own piece of art.

Above all, these artists teach us, through their work, not to be afraid to express ourselves fully.

That's all for today.

Till next week, dear readers.

p.s. Rod was a piece of art himself. The man can only take in so much beauty in one go.

p.p.s. Go to an art museum this week! :)