Soul existence

Twenty years ago in Ireland, pineapple and cheese chunks on sticks, fringed Dralon suites and Blue Nun were bourgeois staples. Pesto, sisal and cappuccino might as well have been the names of the three ugly sisters in some Sicilian version of Cinderella.

Today, the new Irish elite are all Cinderellas, taking the magic wand of new money and transforming their homes into tributes to good taste, achievement and familiarity with the lifestyles of equatorial peasantry.

We've exchanged lino and formica for slate and granite; ripped out swirly carpets and parquet in favour of Italian tiles and rough-hewn wooden floors; replaced the delph with Tuscan pottery and turned our larders into tributes to everything wholegrain, organic and Extra Virgin. The Irish, who were once characterised as bulbous-nosed beer drinkers, are gradually being replaced by a generation of svelte Yoga-practising latte-swillers.

The more money we make, it seems, the simpler we want our lifestyles to appear. Less is more and the leading lights are ostentatiously unostentatious - John Rocha's decoration of the Morrison Hotel being a perfect example.

On a domestic scale, the idea is to spend a hundred grand redecorating while also giving the impression that material things don't interest us. Inspired by the earthiness of Tuscany and Provence, we spend small fortunes on "distressed" new furniture that is made to look old and peasant-honest. We also support a healthy trade in manufacturing "antiques" made from recycled timber and so-called Mexican pine, complete with artificial woodworm holes. Every night of the week on TV there's a different home decorating/gardening/cooking programme. These are aimed not so much at home improvement, as they are at self-improvement and aesthetic enlightenment.

These programmes are DIY guides to upward mobility for meritocrats who have made fortunes in the booming economy. Class used to be something people were born with in Ireland. Today, class is something we consume. Just as in the US, we can climb the social ladder by simply buying the right things. This emerging class of aspiring aesthetes has finally been given a name by David Brooks, an American author, in his just published book, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (Simon and Schuster, $25 in US). In it, he describes Bobos as people who "take the quintessential bourgeois activity, shopping, and turn it into quintessential bohemian activities: art, philosophy, social action. Bobos possess the Midas touch in reverse. Everything we handle turns into soul".

Bobos embody two once contradictory movements - the bourgeois and the bohemian. Throughout history, the pragmatic, uneducated, money-making bourgeoisie and the educated, anti-materialistic bohemian class have viewed each other with contempt. But in the Information Age, the two have merged because education is now the main means of making money.

You can be a 1960s-style rebel at heart and still make more money than anyone dreamed of in the 1980s. Brooks argues, rather convincingly, that this new synergy between money and education has created an elite that quite comfortably combines all the delights of materialism with anti-materialistic value systems. "Thus, Bobos detest yuppies with their limousines, Chanel suits and expensive jewellery. Instead, Bobos prefer to convert their wealth into spiritually and intellectually uplifting experiences. The perfect Bobo couple can spend £5 million on their house while appearing as though they don't care about money. Instead of swish wall-to-wall carpeting, for example, they'll have a floor of reclaimed boards which they may hire a team of men to age using lump hammers. It's a kind of systematic one-downmanship, which owes a lot to the co-optation of oppressed cultures," Brooks believes. "The old elite may have copied the styles of European aristocrats or the colonial masters, but Bobos prefer the colonial victims," he writes.

"In fact, if you tour the super-sophisticated home, you will see an odd melange of artifacts that have nothing in common except for the shared victimisation of their creators. An African mask will sit next to an Incan statue atop a table cloth fashioned from Samoan, Brazilian, Moroccan or Tibetan cloth . . . It is acceptable to display sacred items in an educated person's home so long as they are from a religion neither the host nor any of his or her guests is likely to profess."

Bobos often have streamlined Shaker-style kitchens - harkening back to an ascetic aesthetic, yet where the Shakers rely on open fires and eschew refrigeration, Bobo appliances are the best money can buy. Today's Bobo kitchen, Brooks says, is a vast hangar-like space, "like a culinary playground providing its owners with a series of top-of-the-line peak experiences". Whatever you've got, from the tin opener to the toaster, must be the best. In a Bobo kitchen, "the first thing you see, covering yards and yards of one wall, is an object that looks like a nickel-plated nuclear reactor but is really the stove", he comments.

Then there's the "refrigeration complex", the central theme of which is that "freezing isn't cold enough, the machinery should be able to reach temperatures approaching absolute zero, at which all molecular motion stops. The refrigerator itself should be the size of a mini-van stood on end".

The design of the kitchen really shouldn't be attempted without a team of consultants. "In the old kitchens, you didn't need work triangles because taking steps was not a kitchen activity. You just turned around, and whatever you needed, there it was. But today's infinite kitchens have lunch counters and stools and built-in televisions and bookshelves and computer areas and probably little `You Are Here' maps for guests who get lost on their way to the drink station."

If you're reading this and are still not sure whether you're a Bobo, then cast an eye over your mantelpiece, which no doubt will reflect your exquisite judgement in the realm of livingroom decor. If you're a Bobo, "you can choose candlesticks and picture frames that are eclectic and subversive - an array of statuettes and clocks that is at once daring and spontaneous yet also reflects an elegant unity of thought . . . each item you display will be understood to have been a rare `find'. You will have picked it out from one of those new stores that organise themselves like flea markets. Thousands of less cultivated shoppers will have gone over it before but lacked the sit to stop and appreciate its ironic emanations."

While Brooks writes from an American perspective, the Irish Bobo is near enough to the same shopping experience, thanks to the burgeoning number of home decoration shops in this country specialising in everything that is Provencal, Tuscan or Third World. Usually, this stuff is made up new and then "aged" by peasants who must be bursting their hearts laughing. Shopping has become a means of self-exploration and self-expression. "Happiness," as Wallace Stevens wrote, "is an acquisition."