To many, Terence Conran is synonymous with the Habitat stores he started in the sixties. After designing the way for many in London, he now wants to uplift the drab state of the British food scene. Hae-Yin Loke finds out how and why.

In 1978, London has not steered far from the one-roast-two-veg-and-pudding genre. Undeterred, Conran created the Neal Street restaurant in Covent Garden, three blocks from a staid Royal Opera house. His experiment brought sunburst optimism to a drab food scene: sparse lines dotted with Marcel Breuer cane chairs sat alongside a sensuous modern Sicilian menu. Two decades later, he unleashed the grandly titled Gastrodome, a premium restaurant chain in a once derelict Butler’s Wharf. Quaglino’s, however, will top it all. This summer, the 300-seater opened in St. James in a former Edwardian basement dance hall. Think the bon vivire of Parisian brasseries like La Coupole with the New York business swagger of a Vongs. Is all this far removed from Habitat, the design home store he founded in the sixties?

Design as a business

Other than the Scandinavians and Italians, Conran recalled, “Nobody was doing a mainstream business with any contemporary design conviction, and to do so was to start up my own store”. In his mind, design and innovation have always been the most natural way to add value to products. But there were challenges. Back then, conservative British bankers didn’t necessarily buy into design as a manufacturing factor. Not to mention a discordant post-war social stasis. “Trade then was sneered at by the upper classes. In a country that started the Industrial Revolution, the irony’s that we have an innate societal rejection of people who are in trade. The very people that use their hands to to design, craft and work”. Against these odds, Conran persevered.

The Habitat business ethos, however, references back a century. That is, the William Morris design firm. The late Victorian design house produced some of the most celebrated tapestry and home furnishings. Many of the stencils are still used today. Its workshop in suburban south London brought design, production, and distribution under one domain. To that, Morris’s many writings on the fusion of craft and commerce is reflected in Habitat’s business ideas. In 1964, Habitat opened its doors with a spirited mantra to make useful products designed for people as well as profit.

Form follows profit

By the eighties, Habitat expanded to include British Home Stores, a large national chain. A separate high-end home store, Heals, followed. Conran’s competitive streak, like many European companies, took him across the Atlantic. The competitive U.S. retail sector is littered with epithets of once successful European brands. Anita Roddick’s Body Shop is one such high-profile example. American stranglehold on distributive channels, soaring cost of national advertising, and a highly cyclical consumer-based economy are but a few reasons. By 1988, the Conran group’s rapid stateside expansion was hurting the bottom line. As a befitting prologue, he bought back the Conran group name for GBP 3.5 million. It was time to re-focus.

Habitat’s U.S. tailspin steered Conran back to his core passion: designing for living. He looked back to his first experiment with restaurants and product development to rebuild a design business. No doubt also taking a contemporary page from the rising chefs in New York.  There, Jean-Gorges Vongerichten and David Bouley are rapidly building professionally brand managed restaurant portfolios not just in the U.S., but across international markets.

From Bauhaus and back again

The multibrand design format is seen in his current restaurant portfolio’s model. In Butler’s Wharf alone, its unabashed ambition pivots on popular classics: From Provence (Le Pont de la Tour); to farmhouse English (Chop House); and modern Mediterranean (Blueprint Café); all lying cheek by jowl in an eclectic food chain by the river Thames. Each unit designed with detailed clarity, filtered down to every menu, environment, and service level. Although separate, they are parts of a whole under overarching Octopus publishing and Conran Group managements. The public seem to agree, drawn in droves to a once unfashionable part of the river.

The late morning sun broke through his loft office by the Thames. Wistfully, “We’re all but just a small of group of kids, fresh out of London art schools in the 60s, and totally frustrated in not being able to do our own thing”. This merry band included Mary Quant who went on to ignite a fashion empire along King’s Road. As did Barbara Hulanicki, with her west London taste setting Biba shop in Kensington. Like Conran, they want to fuse good design with a business sensibility, for “we should be able to make and sell things that many or everyone can enjoy and afford”.  This time round, the proof of the pudding will be in the success of his cleverly designed role, that of a resident purveyor of British good taste.

Personality (South East Asia), 2001