Terence Conran in his natural habitat

Sir Terence Conran has filled his home with inspiring objects

With an unabashed love for the simple things in life, acclaimed designer Sir Terence Conran has filled his home with inspiring objects that remind him to keep it real

There is very little that hasn’t been written about Sir Terence Conran, undeniably one of the UK’s most influential arbiters of modern life well lived. So it’s something of a relief to see that the 77-year-old’s latest “autobiographical” book uses intimate, intriguing pictures to tell his story. For much of the past 50 years his surname has been shorthand for a chic yet welcoming “style of life” (Conran despises the more ubiquitous “lifestyle”) and many of us have him to thank for bringing handsome, practical design into our homes.

Inspiration, Conran’s rather impressive 43rd title, serves up a visual feast of long-loved objets trouves, from the sensual shapes of jugs painted by Picasso to bowls of beans picked straight from his garden. The backbone of the impressive tome is his magnificent Georgian country house in Berkshire, Barton Court, which he bought 37 years ago when it was a dilapidated former schoolhouse. It’s crammed with the aesthetic references that have informed Conran’s many loves and lives as a designer, restaurateur, father, grandfather and all-round bon vivant.

Over the past five decades, Conran has had his finger firmly on the pulse of the zeitgeist, displaying an impeccable talent for bringing the things he loves in life into homes around the world. On adventures to France in the 1950s, post the grey and frugal years of World War II in England, he discovered an altogether joyous other way to live: “I looked at (the French) markets,
at the shops where they bought plates, coffee machines, pots and pans. Everything was
simple and functional and I wondered why I couldn’t find these things at home.”

Conran returned to the UK with a burning ambition to bring the same ease of style to his homeland. He set up on his own at 21, with the shell of his father’s old business Conran & Co, and an overdraft of about £300. Opening his first store, Habitat, in London’s South Kensington
in 1964 transformed the British high street by offering “intelligently designed products to as large an audience as possible at a price they could afford”, Conran says. “Habitat did for the home what fashion designers Mary Quant and Biba’s Barbara Hulanicki were doing for clothing – it was part of a minor revolution in taste, instigated by young people who for the first time had a small amount of money in their pockets,” he recalls. His store was the hot spot to see and be seen in, with groovy young Londoners snapping up duvets, woks, modernist chairs and lampshades alongside Twiggy, Michael Caine and George Harrison.

Since then, Conran has made eating out fun through more than 40 restaurants and food stores around the world (among them the showy spectacles of Quaglino’s and the Butler’s Wharf gastrodome, and classics such as Bibendum and Almeida) and made design books informative (titles include How to Live in Small Spaces, The Essential House Book and Easy Living). He is credited with making investing in mid-century and contemporary design desirable (The Conran Shop has eight stores worldwide and Conran still designs furniture ranges for Content by Conran, produced by Benchmark in a barn at Barton Court) and has also contributed to the industry through generous donations, such the £20 million he gave to establish London’s Design Museum in 1989.

“I have never tried to produce fashionable or ground-breaking design,” Conran writes in A Sort of Autobiography (his 2001 book, where he used a Q&A format, answering questions posted by design luminaries, friends and family). “I’ve never designed anything that has reached icon status, and I suspect I never will – although every designer dreams of cracking the design of a classic chair. Plain, simple and useful things don’t win many design prizes but neither do they go out
of fashion,” he says.

Conran is quick to attribute his keen eye for design to growing up in the English countryside in the war-torn 1940s with his mother, Christina, who ensured Conran and his younger sister Priscilla had a creative upbringing. “She put books and art exhibitions in front of us and literally sold the family silver to pay for our design education,” he explains. Sent to Bryanston, a respected public school in Dorset where the arts were as important as the classics and alumni include Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkin, Conran embraced the teachings of his tutor, sculptor Donald Potter.

Later, at London’s Central School of Arts and Crafts (now Central St Martins), he studied textile design and bonded with another tutor, renowned artist Eduardo Paolozzi, who became a lifelong friend and source of inspiration. Conran first worked as a textile designer, then began making chairs for department stores. “Terence broke the rules,” says Vittorio Radice, a former Conran employee and one-time managing director of Selfridges, of the early Habitat days. “He was selling not needs but wants – and with passion.” Adds hotelier Ian Schrager: “He popularised stylish plastic stacking chairs, non-flowery canvas couches and paper lamps by Noguchi. It’s not unlike what Andy Warhol did in the art world – he took the pretension out of art and made it for everybody.” Stafford Cliff, Conran’s collaborator on Inspiration, says the designer can “see beauty in simple things – he finds inspiration just as often in utilitarian industrial objects as the forms and colours of nature”.

Despite Conran’s advancing years, it’s unlikely that Inspiration is his swansong. “Death is when it will all stop,” he quips about retirement. “I’d rather die with an unfinished project on the drawing board.” Instead, as with all he touches, the book strikes a chord with today’s need for finding meaning and substance in the things we bring into our homes. One-season-only consumption is out; investing in pieces with simplicity, elegance and longevity is in – and Conran is the biggest purveyor of this trend.

“My home is filled with the many things I have liked and collected over the years, which remain a constant source of inspiration to me,” he says. “I rarely get rid of everything – it just moves about. These are the things I have loved all my life and still give me pleasure.”

The images and stories of Barton Court bring to life his “little museums of objects”. Among them are a collection of 20 Bugatti pedal cars lining the halls, rows of copper pots, 19th-century pub mugs and cabinets of coloured glass, old and new. “When I discover something I like,” he explains, “it is generally because it has a sense of proportion, balance and individual character – old carpenters’ tools that feel right in the hand, or a milk jug that has a modest elegance.”

Like much of what Conran does – finding synergies between the things he loves and the commercial enterprises he pursues – Inspiration is essentially a thorough follow-up. Two years ago, he undertook a little project for Moleskine, maker of high-quality notebooks. Conran was one of 70 leading architects, designers and illustrators asked to fill a notebook with photographs and sketches of things that he found motivating and thrilling in life.

Conran’s Moleskine includes the work of Charles Eames (“a serious designer who didn’t take things too seriously”) and film director Peter Greenaway, alongside images of spacecraft, objects connected with travel in the 1920s and ’30s, Thonet Bentwood furniture, fireworks, watermills, Japanese teahouses, garden tools, leaf skeletons, butterflies and dragonflies. He lists his hobbies as “design, cigars, burgundy, grouse, vegetables, crustaceans, fireworks and jazz”. As an afterthought, he’s scribbled “gardens and girls”.

“I’m mainly a visual person,” Conran says of his habit for constantly sketching ideas and designs on paper, the backs of envelopes and even cocktail napkins, all with a beloved 2B pencil. He has always scrapbooked ideas, storing them for future use. “Eduardo (Paolozzi) gave me a piece of advice I have never forgotten: to go out and see as many things as possible, stock up your brain with images and your imagination will have a resource to fall back on for many years.”

But success and a personal fortune estimated at £76 million ($170 million) does not mean Conran has not loved and lost along the way. He floated Habitat in 1981 and merged with a number of British retailers, including Mothercare and Bhs, to form Storehouse. Though at one point the group posted revenues of £1.5 billion and employed 33,000, Conran retired from Storehouse in 1989 after creative and operational differences with the team at Bhs. He relinquished his beloved Habitat but managed to buy back The Conran Shop. In the late 1990s, his involvement in the revamping of Georges in Melbourne, alongside Country Road founder Stephen Bennett, could not prevent the Australian retail institution closing a year later.

Conran’s love life has been similarly complicated. He has married four times – at 23 to Brenda Davison (which lasted less than six months), then to Shirley Pearce (who found fame in the 1970s with her Superwoman manual for the modern working woman), with whom he had sons Sebastian and Jasper. For 30 years he was married to renowned food writer Caroline Herbert and had three more children – Tom, Sophie and Ned – but the union ended in 1996 with a record-breaking settlement of £10.5 million. His latest wife is Vicki Davis, an interior designer who was working on a house for U2’s Bono in the south of France when they met there in the late 1990s. She has three children from a previous marriage.

Despite the highs and lows, there is no denying the legacy he will eventually leave. All Conran’s children are either involved in his various businesses or running their own and there is no telling how far-reaching this design dynasty’s influence will be.

Sebastian is creative director at Conran & Partners and a prolific product designer, masterminding ranges such as Nigella Lawson’s kitchen accessories and revamping Nissan’s Cube car for the Japanese market. “Both my parents were pretty strict about not having too many toys but there was never a shortage of workshop and artists’ materials,” Sebastian recalls. “Once I showed a drawing of an invention to Dad, apologising that it wasn’t drawn from life, and he responded that drawing from my imagination was far better. The only time I really noticed the influence of Dad’s fame was when I went for my interview at Central St Martins and someone said, ‘Don’t think you’re going to walk in here just because you’re Terence Conran’s son’.”

W ith the likes of David Hockney and Francis Bacon visiting Barton Court over the years it’s not surprising that one of Conran’s children became an artist. From an early age, Ned was that boy (and he has had a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions in London). “To see everyone being creative around you makes you feel that’s the norm,” he says. “The expectation to be brilliant was definitely a drawback – you couldn’t get away with any old rubbish – but what I most enjoyed about growing up with my father was his appreciation of beauty, what he’d call having ‘a discerning eye’.

“Our way of life as children was, to an extent, harmonious with our surroundings. We ate from the garden, bred chickens, understood where our food came from and how things were made. I was given the tools and freedom to create what I liked, and having some of the greatest artists of the 20th century hanging around may have helped, too!”

Tom, the eldest of Conran’s three children with Caroline, runs a number of successful eateries in London’s Notting Hill, including well-regarded gastro pub The Cow. Yet it’s his sister Sophie and their half-brother Jasper who have taken the design world by storm with their best-selling tableware collections. Jasper, a respected fashion designer since he first hit the catwalk in the 1990s, has created ranges for Wedgwood and Waterford Crystal, and licenses clothes and homewares to a department store.

Sophie’s rustic oven-to-table collaboration with Portmeirion, as well as wallpaper designs
for Arthouse, endorsements for Aga cookers and a burgeoning career as a food writer, have made her a household name. “There were always ideas bubbling around,” Sophie says of her childhood. “I was about eight when we moved into Barton Court and, although it was almost derelict, I learnt to see its potential and what goes into making a warm, inviting home. Dad’s enthusiasm was contagious.” While Jasper draws on historic references, Sophie’s inspiration is closer to her father’s. “I want to design things that make everyday life more pleasurable – not necessarily to shout out but to serve as a backdrop to life.”

This ideology is key to Conran’s approach to work and play. Home for him has always needed to be comfortable and welcoming but also a place to be productive: “My home is where I feel most relaxed and content,” he says. “Here I have the time and space to think. This integrated approach to home and work life means one is never stifled by the other; there is always some kind of balance. That is the key to a happy, easy existence.”

Alongside his ambition to move the Design Museum to bigger premises, and his work on a 20ha urban regeneration site in Tokyo and The Boundary complex (a boutique hotel, restaurant and cafe in London’s Shoreditch), there is no sign Conran is retiring any time soon. “I am lucky in that practically everything I do in my business life I would also do for pleasure: designing, writing, eating, drinking, shopping, travelling, gardening – even smoking cigars – are all connected in some way to my work,” he enthuses. “I enjoy the diversity of my life. Maybe I’m a jack of all trades and master of none, but if a new and relevant challenge comes along I’ll leap at it.”

Inspiration by Terence Conran and Stafford Cliff (Conran Octopus/Hachette Livre) retails for $69.99 and is out now.