NOT A CULT: My Bauhaus childhood, when molding was a crime.

My Bauhaus-educated parents had a hand in this transformation, though my younger self struggled to understand their passionate opinions about design.

I remember back in 1983 when my architect father traveled all the way from New York City to Columbus, Ohio to visit my first apartment. The ratty brick house cost less to rent than my parents’ parking spot. My father stepped into my beige-carpeted room and said, “These old places sure do have a lot of molding.”

I commented, “It’s kind of sweet, isn’t it?”

He turned pale. “If you like molding, you are a fool and a failure.” The profound disappointment in his voice made the charge sting even more. He had dedicated his life to Bauhaus values, and he had evidently raised a daughter who, tragically, didn’t seem to share them.

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It has taken me most of my life to figure out what is “good,” design-wise, from the amalgam of my parents’ tastes. I remember asking myself as a kid, over and over inside my head. “Am I supposed to like this?” I still ponder that question when I find an object that pushes the crafty boundaries of art. My parents’ opinions are sometimes surprising. They loved Shaker furniture. They disliked Andy Warhol. They loved “The Yellow Submarine.” They hated black velvet paintings. They loved laboratory glassware. Designer clothes were stupid. It was all so hard to figure out!

In the second half of my life I’ve worked to communicate their fine-tuned aesthetic to my children and now my wife, Peggy, who asked, while we were first dating, “Who is this Mr. Bauhaus?”

You really won’t like what you see, if you look too closely at the answer.