Terence Conran

Chairman, Conran Holdings Ltd.

Nationality: British.

Born: August 4, 1931, in London, England.

Education: Attended Central School of Arts and Crafts, 1949–1950.

Family: Son of Rupert Conran and Christine Halstead; married Brenda Davison (architect), 1954 (divorced 1955); married Shirley Ida Pierce, 1955 (divorced 1962); married Caroline Herbert (writer), 1963 (divorced 1966); married Victoria Davis (design-business manager), 2000; children: five (second marriage, two; third marriage, three).

Career: Rayon Centre, 1950–1951, textile designer; Dennis Lennon Studio, 1951–1952, interior designer; Conran and Company, 1952–1956, freelance furniture designer; Conran Design Group, 1956–1971, director; Habitat, 1964–1971, director; Habitat Mothercare Limited, 1982–1990, chairman; Conran Roche Architectural and City Planning, 1982–1993, director; CD Partnership, 1993–1999, chairman; Conran Holdings Ltd., 1990–, chairman.

Awards: Duke of Edinburgh Awards for design management, Royal Society of Arts, 1968 and 1975; Design Medal, Society of Industrial Artists and Designers, 1980; Bicentenary Medal, Royal Society of Arts, 1982; knighthood, Queen's New Year Honors, 1983; honorary fellow, Royal Institute of British Architects, 1984; President's Award for outstanding contribution to British design, Design and Art Direction (DA&D), 1989; Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres, government of France, 1992; Design Award, House Beautiful, 2002.

Publications: The House Book, 1974; The Essential House Book: Getting Back to Basics, 1994; Terence Conran on Design, 1996; Terence Conran Q&A: A Sort of Autobiography, 2001.

Address: Conran Holdings Ltd., 22 Shad Thames, London SE1 2YU, England; http://www.conran.com.

Terence Conran became one of the most successful and influential figures in the design world in the latter half of the 20th century. His business empire encompassed a furniture-making business, an architecture and planning group, a design company, a book publishing company, a hotel, and restaurants. He sought to create a wide range of accessible products whose simple forms would be both pleasing to the eye and a reflection of their function, and he used his various endeavors to expound this design philosophy.

Early Life and Career

Conran was born in 1931 in London. In 1952, after studying textile design in London and working at the Rayon Centre, Conran established his own furniture-making business, Conran and Company. In 1953 he opened his first restaurant, Soup Kitchen. He founded the Conran Design Group in London in 1956 and Habitat furnishing stores in 1964.

Conran was perhaps best known for the Habitat stores, an offshoot of which was the more upscale Conran Shop chain. Habitat's streamlined, functional designs had wide international appeal, making high-quality, modern furniture, and housewares affordable to the middle class. His other retail holdings included the Mothercare shops, selling clothing for mothers and babies, and Hepworth stores, specializing in men's wear. In 1986 Habitat and Mothercare merged with British Home Stores; the merged entity became known as the Storehouse Group. Conran retired from Storehouse in 1990, and the Habitat stores were sold to Ikea. The Conran Shop chain, however, continued into the 21st century.

Other Business Interests

In 1982 Conran cofounded Conran Roche Architectural and City Planning. In 1993, with the incorpation of several interior designers, this business morphed into CD Partnership, and in 1999 the entity changed its name to Conran and Partners. The Great Eastern Hotel in London, a joint venture between Conran and Wyndham International, opened in 2000.

Following his retirement from Storehouse Group, Conran founded Conran Associates, which became one of the largest design consultancies in Europe. Through this entity, Conran expanded his design empire to encompass clothing, office products, and graphic design projects. Both Conran Associates and Conran and Partners were subsumed under the umbrella name Conran Holdings, of which Conran was chairman.

The designer incorporated his interest in cooking and fine food into his career by opening a series of restaurants in London and other major European cities. Following Soup Kitchen were restaurants including Bibendum, Mezzo, the Zinc Bar, Bluebird, and Alcazar.

To reach an even broader market for his design concepts, Conran published his first of many books, The House Book, in 1974. Originally intended as an in-house training manual for Habitat employees, the work evolved into an influential manual for planning and designing the modern home. Following its success, Conran wrote several more design books before founding Conran Octopus publishing in 1983. His books covered a broad range of topics, from home decor to gardening to cooking, and gained him a measure of celebrity. Conran also wrote an autobiography, Terence Conran Q&A, chronicling his lengthy, multifaceted career, in which he describes himself as a "hard-working hedonist."

Gaining Widespread Recognition

Conran's contributions to design and architecture won him recognition from numerous professional organizations and governments. He received awards from the Royal Society of Arts, the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers, and the Association for Business Sponsorship of the Arts, among others, and was honored with a knighthood in 1983.

Sources for Further Information

Bailey, Stephen, ed., Conran Directory of Design, New York: Villard Books, 1985.

MacCarthy, Fiona, "The Emperor Strikes Back," Guardian, July 8, 1995.

Nadelson, Reggie, "Terence Takes Manhattan," Vogue USA, December 1999.

Phillips, Barty, Conran and the Habitat Story, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1984.

Williams, Alex, "Welcome Back, Conran," New York Magazine, http://www.newyorkmetro.com/nymetro/realestate/urbandev/features/1592/.

—Lisa Wolff

(b Esher, Surrey, 4 Oct 1931). English designer, retailer and entrepreneur. From 1947 to 1951 he trained at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, London. In 1956 he formed the Conran Design Group, and for the next 12 years he expanded the practice and the manufacture of his furniture and textile designs, which were sold into a mainly non-domestic market. He believed passionately that well-designed, reasonably priced products for the home should be available to the mass market, and in 1964 he opened the first Habitat shop in Fulham Road, London, which put his ideas into practice. He chose every article for its visual appeal and fitness for purpose, and his innovative settings of simple furniture and fabrics allied to massed displays of inexpensive glass, china, kitchenware and coloured enamel introduced aspiring homemakers to a new lifestyle. By 1983 some 50 Habitat shops were trading in Britain and abroad. In the same year he was knighted and received the Royal Society of Art's Bicentenary Medal for 'exerting an exceptional influence in promoting art and design in British industry'. In 1986 he became chairman of the Storehouse retailing empire, a position from which he resigned in 1990 after a somewhat turbulent four years.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Conran has played a seminal role in changing attitudes in design retailing in Britain since 1964 when he established the first Habitat in the Fulham Road, London. An active designer and entrepreneur he has influenced many facets of contemporary life, whether in terms of the appearance and consumption of well-designed modern products, the promotion of design in museum contexts as in the Design Museum, London, or the establishment of a number of well-known restaurants. His commitment to higher standards of design in daily life has managed to capture the imagination of consumers in ways that the non-commercial and occasionally high-minded didacticism, of state-funded organizations such as the Design Council have often failed to do. Conran's House Book of 1973 proved influential for the domestic lifestyle of many, an outlook reinforced by the many books about interiors, crafts, decorative arts, cookery, and gardening published by Conran Octopus books. A student in textile design under Eduardo Paolozzi at the Central School of Art and Design (See Central School of Arts and Crafts) in 1949, he worked at the Rayon Centre, London, in 1950 and, in the following year, as a designer in Denis Lennon's studio. Conran played a minor role designing furniture for the 1951 Festival of Britain before setting up a small furniture and design workshop in 1952, his early clients including Edinburgh Weavers and John Lewis. He commenced his entrepreneurial career in the mid-1950s with the launch of his Soup Kitchen restaurant, the first of three in London, with a fourth in Cambridge. He went on to establish the Conran Design Group in 1956, working ina number of fields, including textiles, ceramics, and furniture, and was particularly influenced by the elegance of contemporary Italian design and the clean modern lines that characterized post-Second World War Scandinavian goods. Conran's first Habitat store was opened in 1964 and the idea (aided and sustained by his close associate Oliver Gregory) rapidly expanded through a network of Habitat and Conran stores across Britain, Europe, and the USA. Many of the goods sold in the early years proved highly attractive to a younger generation of consumers open to fresh ideas, whether French cookware, brightly coloured Eastern European coffee pots and mugs, or stylish furniture at affordable prices. Habitat's approach was influenced by the Swedish design retailer IKEA (which, in the 1990s, took over Habitat). The success of his venture led to the floating of the Habitat chain on the Stock Market in 1981 and the allocation of some of his profits to establish the charitable Conran Foundation. Conran took over the high-quality design retailer, Heal's in 1983. Other notable retailing chains in which Conran has had a substantial managerial involvement included Mothercare (children's products), bought in 1982, and British Homes Stores (mass-market clothing and domestic products), purchased in 1986, which, with Habitat, became Storehouse plc with Conran as chairman and chief executive. Economic problems in Britain in the later 1980s led to Conran's withdrawal from the enterprise in 1990. However in 1992 he bought back the Conran Shops that he had first established in 1973 to complement the increasingly numerous Habitat outlets, later opening Conran stores in Japan, Germany, and France. For many years Conran had also been concerned to establish a new museum devoted to design at a time when few museums were committed to the display and understanding of contemporary design culture. The first steps were taken with the opening of the Boilerhouse Gallery in the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1981, under the curatorship of Stephen Bayley, and culminated with the establishment of the Design Museum in Butler's Wharf, London, in 1989. These twinned initiatives were intended to provide designers, design students, and the public with the means of stimulating design awareness on a broader front than had been the case with the state-funded Design Council. Throughout his life Conran has continued to be involved with the design process, setting up Conran Associates in 1971, a consultancy with a leaning towards corporate identity and product design. In connection with the latter he won a Design Centre Award in 1974 for a series of brightly coloured plastic containers for Crayonne, a subsidiary of Airfix Plastics. His interest in furniture design has remained undiminished since his contributions to the 1951 Festival of Britain. In 1983 he established a furniture-making company, Benchmark Woodwork and, in 2002, he produced his first range of mass-produced furniture since launching Habitat almost four decades earlier with a collection for G Plan entitled Content by Conran. This range is marketed in furniture warehouses, with the aim of selling quality furniture at low prices. His interest in restaurants has also spanned half a century, with a considerable acceleration in the 1990s, his more recent ventures including the Bluebird restaurant (1990), Le Pont de la Tour (1991), and the Great Eastern Hotel (2000). Terence Conran was knighted in 1983 for services to British design and retailing.

Quotes:

"Perhaps believing in good design is like believing in God, it makes you an optimist."

"Arguably the only goods people need these days are food and happiness."

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