Visionary reshaped British life
Sir Terence Conran Designer and entrepreneur BORN OCTOBER 4, 1931 – DIED SEPTEMBER 12, 2020, AGED 88
FEW designers have left as rich and varied a legacy as Sir Terence Conran but he always felt his greatest achievement was London’s Design Museum. Through his Habitat shops he brought woks, Le Creuset casserole dishes, flat- pack furniture, paper lampshades and much more to the attention of shoppers keen to follow the latest homeware trends.
A night spent in a Swedish hotel inspired him to bring duvets to Britain and, today, few homes are without them. Following on from the success of Habitat, which he founded in 1964, he launched the more upmarket Conran shops and some 50 restaurants. The Mezzo in London was able to seat 700.
Born in Kingston upon Thames, he first showed his creative side aged 12 when he made furniture for a doll’s house. After leaving Bryanston School in Dorset, he honed his skills at the Central School of Art and Design in London, now Central Saint Martins, where he formed a strong friendship with a tutor, the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. In 1952 he started selling furniture from a showroom in Piccadilly Arcade, central London and four years later formed the Conran Design Group. One of his first projects was creating a store for Mary Quant in Knightsbridge. Quant would later repay the favour, designing the uniforms for staff working in the first Habitat store in Chelsea in the mid- 1960s.
Just a few years later, Conran opened the Neal Street Restaurant, which was run by his sister Priscilla and her husband Antonio Carluccio. Recognition of his design talent and business brilliance came in the form of a knighthood in 1983.
The first Design Museum opened at Butler’s Wharf in 1989. Some 780,000 visitors came in the first year. It moved to Kensington High Street in 2016. Sir Terence married architect Brenda Davidson aged 19 but the union only lasted six months. He had two sons, Jasper and Sebastian, with his second wife, novelist Shirley Conran. Following their divorce in 1982, he married Caroline Herbert and had three more children, Edmund, Tom and Sophie, but after 33 years they split. While in France he met his fourth wife, Vicki.
“What I’ve managed to achieve, in a small way, is to get the country to appreciate design. That’s what I hope to leave behind,” he once said. A whisky and cigars man, he grew old gracefully, and died peacefully at home.