You Can Call Him Sir Terence
For 40 years, British designer Terence Conran led the charge toward a single-minded populist idea: Make good taste available to Everyman.
He sold simple, clean-lined furnishings in postwar Britain, then crossed over to conquer the Continent. Eventually he plied his wares in trendy design stores along America’s East Coast.
Now, just as the democratic design bandwagon has begun to roll into every Kmart and Target, the champion of cheap chic has abandoned the cause. Sir Terence is going up-market.
The Terence Conran Shop opened in New York in December, with its star feature a new chair created by Philippe Starck for the American company Emeco. Highly polished and hand finished, the deluxe model is a sequel to a utilitarian classic created for the U.S. Navy and manufactured since 1944.
The original Navy chair is in Conran’s tony London restaurant, Quaglino’s. Ever the savvy design merchant, he snapped up an exclusive deal to sell the new one, at about twice the price of the $400 original.
“You need designers to create new wants in the Western world,” he says philosophically. “Civilization’s needs are satisfied.”
Fair warning: Conran has been a decade ahead of major postwar lifestyle wants on both sides of the Atlantic.
Sir Terence--who was knighted in 1983--holds court in an inconspicuous Modern building of his own firm’s design across the river Thames and just down from the Tower of London. He sits wedged among an exterior glass wall, a giant palm and a broad oak writing desk that he crafted three decades ago. The river is at his back. If Conran lifts his eyes above the very undesigned mess of papers, magazines, pottery and memorabilia, his gaze will fall on a prized collection of mid-century Modern Americana: a set of molded fiberglass chairs by Charles and Ray Eames.
Now 68, the sage of good design is reflecting upon how profoundly America once influenced him.
“In the late 1940s, I was looking at the West Coast of America. That’s where it was happening,” he says, recalling paging through Arts & Architecture, a Los Angeles magazine that was the bible of good design in its era. “It was a great inspiration.”
But if the Eames era was a high point, innovative American design soon disappeared.
“I think what happened to America,” he says, “is that, yes, design continued to happen. But intelligent design went underground.”
Europeans and the Japanese took the Eames culture and enlarged it, while Americans looked backward. Furniture entered what Conran calls the “turgid” phase. “All those people selling ‘heritage,’ ” he says. “Badly made furniture with distressed finishes--like something from the dungeon.”
Despite the current wave of self-congratulatory euphoria over designer toothbrushes in every holder, he thinks there’s room for improvement.
“America is growing up,” he offers politely. “It’s still in adolescence.”
What concerns him is the American mania for shopping by price. The risk is that design at discounted prices will lead to discounted design.
“America is enormously used to a culture of ‘on sale,’ ” he says. “It’s destroying quality in America.”
Assessing the impact of his words, he jokes that he hopes U.S. Customs agents will let him back in.
Design history will record that Conran earned two sizable fortunes (his current worth is reported at 100 million pounds, or about $150 million) by understanding where people were going stylistically before they did.
He tapped into the housing boom that propelled the home furnishings business, the baby boom that demanded low-cost maternity and children’s fashions and, lately, the stock market boom that has made young people rich enough to eat out in his growing empire of restaurants.
Right now, while the design Zeitgeist is a swirl of colorful, impossibly cheap plastic, the products in his shops--in cities including London, Paris, New York, Tokyo and Berlin--are aimed at a sophisticated, well-to-do clientele. (Conran is considering opening an L.A. store.)
He stocks plastic kitchenware, but the stores’ highlights are Conran-designed furniture: thick English oak tables rustic enough for a vacation house in Provence, slabs of acid-etched zinc for ageless cocktail tables, and a huge, roll-arm, velvet-upholstered sofa like one he has at home.
Collectors of his writings--”The House Book,” “The Kitchen Book,” “The Bath Book,” etc.--may still look on him as the most trusted voice on you-can-have-it-too style. But the 1,000 exclusive designs in the Conran Collection are aimed at people who know to look for garden equipment in the “Conservatory” department.
Conran, of course, has always scored big points for his impeccable eye for good design. His trajectory started in London in 1964 with his belief that good taste was not the province of the rich. He opened a novel little design shop called Habitat to prove the point.
There, he displayed reasonably priced modern furniture, often ready to assemble, with stylish ceramics from Italy, classic kitchen gear from Paris and bright Marimekko cottons from Finland. From sofas, chairs and tables to pots, pans and pillows, the selections were filtered through one designer’s eye and housed under one roof. The formula transformed the way people have shopped for home furnishings ever since.
Trendy Conran outposts followed in the United States, including one at the Beverly Center, which closed in the early 1990s. Conran is quick to point out that a store in Cambridge, Mass., called Design Research was offering a similar mix at about the same time. Both were inspired by the German Bauhaus school, which taught that a better society could be achieved through functional, affordable industrial design.
Design Research passed into history. Conran went on to make millions selling fresh, youthful design at modest prices.
“The realization came slowly that we had done something that would change things,” he says. “I am embarrassed to say that Habitat was the first ‘lifestyle’ store.”
Britain’s Observer newspaper summed up the Conran environment this way: “Terence made us want to look and eat like we inhabited an island in the Med, even when it rained.”
Early Love of Arts and Crafts
Conran began making pottery and furniture as a young student in Dorset and describes himself as “extremely good at it.” He went on to specialize in textiles at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts. Shortly thereafter, as a struggling craftsman, he sold two chairs to Pablo Picasso through the intercession of a friend who was dating one of the artist’s models. U.S. architect Philip Johnson acquired another.
“It was the thrill of my life,” he says.
Though he is now surrounded by teams of 30-something architects and designers, product buyers and managers, Conran still sparks the design.
“I go to my house in the country or to France and think about it,” he says. “Then I’ll draw pages and pages of ideas. I form a vision of how it might work, details that would make it special.”
Conran succeeded in building his initial Habitat store into a retailing empire called Storehouse (no relation to the U.S. company). At its height, it had sales of 1.7 billion pounds, 33,000 employees and 900 fashion and design stores.
“I had a very clear vision,” he says. “The idea was to make things better designed, better looking, competitively priced.”
By the end of the ‘80s, the business climate had changed. As he tells it now, merger mania and marketing men took over. Focus groups led to a watering down of style. The impeccable taste he had sought to provide affordably wasn’t assured.
By the time he stepped down from the corporation in 1990, Habitat had become the butt of “Shabitat” jokes. In the United States, the Conran stores, which had begun to look a bit worn around the edges, were sold off to Marvin Traub and closed. The Habitat group was spun off and sold to the owner of Ikea. Conran kept only the original shop and his design team.
“I was disillusioned with what I was doing in life,” Conran says. “This was the time to change.”
Blending Food and Design
When Conran struck out in a new direction, as a restaurateur, he created a new kind of designer emporium: the “gastrodome.”
It combines two aspects that are important to him, food and design. During the past decade, he has opened nearly two dozen upscale restaurants, sushi bars and clubs.
Almost all are in rehabbed architectural landmarks. The restaurants often anchor a cluster made up of a design shop, a flower market and a gourmet food store. Celebrities, from British royals to rapper Puff Daddy, have followed.
Guastavino’s, which opened in February under the Queensboro Bridge, is Conran’s first American restaurant complex.
The setting at 59th Street and First Avenue in Manhattan is a soaring turn-of-the-century marketplace designed by Rafael Guastavino, a Spanish architect. The architecture is remarkable for 36 self-supporting, tiled vaults, some 40 feet high, which languished for 60 years as city-owned storage. Conran’s lead architect, James Soane, worked with Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates of New York to turn the space into a two-tiered restaurant.
“When we arrived, it was all dark and boarded up, with barbed wire,” Conran recalls. “When we got inside, there was this faint stirring” of the homeless and stray dogs encamped under grime-covered arches. “It was medieval.”
They filled in the arches with glass and steel and slid a deck of American cherry across the cavernous space to create a loft. Overhead, commuters drive home to Queens.
Just outside, they excavated under the sidewalk to create the shop. Granite pillars of the bridge were left exposed amid the bath, bedding, dining, stationery, toy, lighting and pet departments. Conran calls this his “Stonehenge.”
It was there in February that the design merchant puffed thoughtfully on an ever-present cigar and confronted the central contradiction of his career: Though he remains a champion of affordable design, he has given up the crusade.
“My philosophy of that time, and even today, is why shouldn’t things intelligently designed be available to everybody,” he says. But designing for “the lowest common denominator” had proved too depressing.
“I am falling on my sword,” he says. “I admit it’s an undemocratic view, but there it is. What’s more interesting at this point in life is trying to be as democratic as possible . . . but to contribute more by being more original, by sticking your neck out.”
