Life & Wisdom Quote by Margot Asquith

A rich man’s house, Asquith implies, is a museum curated by anxiety. The line lands because it refuses the usual flattery of wealth: money doesn’t elevate taste, it often sabotages it. Her triad - “seldom beautiful, rarely comfortable, and never original” - tightens like a verdict, each clause narrowing the escape hatch until “never” snaps shut. The jab isn’t really about furniture; it’s about the social performance embedded in rooms.

Asquith wrote from inside Britain’s elite world, close enough to read its tells. In that Edwardian-to-interwar milieu, a “beautiful” home was less a private refuge than a public argument: proof of legitimacy, lineage, discernment. The more money in play, the more the house becomes an audition for status, stuffed with safe signals - period pieces, inherited styles, approved decorators. Comfort loses because comfort is personal, and personal is risky; originality is banned because originality announces a self, and the upper tiers are trained to present a class.

The subtext is a quiet democratic thrill. “People of moderate means” get to feel, for once, like the clear-eyed adults in the room. Their smaller homes can be idiosyncratic because the stakes are lower: fewer visitors to impress, fewer traditions to obey, fewer committees (literal or internal) to consult. Asquith’s real target is the superstition that wealth purchases aesthetic truth. She treats beauty as something earned through attention and courage, not acquired through invoices.