STEPHEN BAYLEY

The Aesthete

Terence Conran died in September. He had been an enormous presence in my life for more than 40 years. First, as a distant inspirational figure. Then, by happy accident, as a patron, mentor, friend. Then antagonist, then friend again. Finally, as an antagonist. Who knows what might next occur from the other side of the Styx?

You know what they say about love and hate: they are not opposites, but different aspects of the same condition. Hate is not the opposite to love. Indifference is the opposite to love. Terence took three major legal actions against me, then declared his undying affection.

Like everyone else in this country, I knew the Conran phenomenon even before I knew the man himself. For over 50 years, his various shops and restaurants had introduced his countrymen to optimistic – French-flavoured – furniture and food. He was a complex man, a sad individual who made Britain a more cheerful place. If you have a quarry-tiled kitchen, have admired a gutsy butcher’s block, coveted a ‘Bauhaus’ chair or have eaten pâté in your pub, then you have been touched by his influence. The crude shorthand is that Terence was a ‘designer’. He was not much of a designer at all. His autograph furniture was derivative and he lacked originality. Instead, he was a synthesiser of genius, quick to spot and exploit a trend. He had a much broader sense of what was possible than most and had the mercurial flair and prodigal energy to make it happen. He was a print-media influencer who monetised his own taste and sold it back to us as ‘design’. And this, we were told, was good for us. He made access to ‘design’ a tool of social promotion. His special insight was to re-purpose ‘design’ not as an activity (such as whittling a stick or throwing a pot), but as a commodity you could acquire. And it was best if you acquired it from one of his Habitat shops.

While listening to Terence you might get the impression that he actually invented the baguette, pâté, the Bauhaus, France, red wine, the 2CV and Eileen Gray. It was not enough for him to have made a commercial success of importing the first duvets into Britain; instead, he had to claim it had revolutionised the nation’s sex life. Were eiderdowns anaphrodisiac? Possibly, yes…

And Terence adored cars and car culture, although if you mentioned, say, ‘slip angle’ or ‘piston slap’ he would have responded with a trademark smutty giggle. The mechanics of the automobile meant nothing to him; he saw cars as accessories to a civilised life. While he did not have a clue about Citroën’s high-pressure hydraulics, he could rhapsodise about loping along the Route Nationale 7 in a DS after lunch in Burgundy and en route to dinner in Provence. L’art de vivre was his religion and you could look upon a car as a place of worship.

Nearly his last great adventure was the restoration of London’s Michelin Building, the Art Deco masterpiece in Brompton with glorious ceramic tiles illustrating the great early motor races, Paris-Madrid or the Tour de France, for example. Terence identified with the Michelin aperçu that the point of a great car was to connect travel with food. In the Michelin building he built Bibendum, once his best restaurant. The inflated hominid (inspired by a pile of tyres) with brandy glass and cigar was almost a self-portrait.

Vehicles adorned his personal mythology. There was an early trip to Italy in a Riley (type unspecified: details were for little people) to pick up London’s first espresso machine. Then a gastronomic tour of France in the footsteps of Elizabeth David, as a passenger in photographer Michael Wyckham’s Lagonda (type unspecified). When I met him in the late 1970s he was about halfway through a sequence of 11 or 12 Porsche 911s. In 1979, when such things were possible, he parked his and I parked my Ford Capri outside a little Soho restaurant long since disappeared and, after two bottles of Burgundy, we raced down The Mall to his house in Belgravia for a nightcap of Poire William.

A bad back forced him to retire the Porsche habit. In his plutocrat moment there were S-class Benzes and 12-cylinder BMW 7-series that didn’t move him at all. Latterly he enjoyed the visual austerity of big Audis. In his country house there was an astonishing display of model Bugatti T35s. But when his back became extremely bad, Terence bought an old Bentley. Ankledeep Wilton, squidgy, crackled Connolly chairs, a ride like a Channel ferry in Beaufort 6, a funeral parlour’s worth of glossy wood: more was more. When I first saw it, I asked: ‘What in God’s name is this?’ He smiled benignly and blew a puff of Havana at me.

One of the many things Terence Conran taught me was not to search for consistency in genius.

‘TERENCE CONRAN ADORED CARS, BUT SAYING “SLIP ANGLE” OR “PISTON SLAP” WOULD ELICIT A SMUTTY GIGGLE’

STEPHEN BAYLEY SB is the individual for whom the term ‘design guru’ could have been coined. He was the founding director of London’s Design Museum and his best-selling books include Sex, Drink and Fast Cars and Taste: the Secret Meaning of Things.