Hi-tech ethnic
Michael Buhler
Conran and the Habitat story
Barry Phillips (Weidenfeld £9.95)
BY page 109 I was deeply immersed in the problems of Mothercare, a chain of baby-clothes shops owned by a man called Selina Zilkha who apparently liked to think Of 'changing his life every twenty years'. Unfortunately, he employed as merchandis- tng director an ex-nurse whose ideas didn't seem to change at all, and as a consequence Mothercare was in deep trouble. Though. ts turned to Terence. 'We went to see him
we thought he could add to the business what it lacked and we didn't ourselves understand. I'd known Terence or fifteen years and always thought he was a tremendous goer.'
Well, if there's one thing that comes aerosS even by page 2, it's that he is nothing if n.o.t
a goer. He showed no great academic
at school but did have a flair for Latetal work and pottery which was taught by a pupil of Eric Gill. Expelled from arYanston (something to do with a rowdy ,,Party and girls), he went to the Central '01001 to study textiles — one of his teachers being Paolozzi, with whom he later set. up up a little workshop in Bethnal Green. London in the early Fifties was a drab and unexciting place for a young man without much money. He struggled to make a living from his fabric and furniture and found it anything but easy. 'I'd done two hundred carver chairs for a restaurant and some fat fellow came in and sat down. When he got up, the chair stuck to his arse. nYself was so thin at the time, my aunts 'eat me food parcels.' Probably the result of overwork, but then there was little else to do. 'Our lives were spent in coffee bars and Dclubs. They didn't even have cheese in those se It Was in 1954 that he and a friend decid- ed to change this state of affairs. They Strand, the Soup Kitchen just off the trand. Neither of them could cook, so they sto tO soup, apple flan and an espresso him machine. The Soup Kitchen gave • an OPportunity to try out some novel Ideas for interiors, such as tongue-and- groove panelling, tiled table tops and clUarry tiles on the floor. Customers paid Hinepence for a pint of soup in blue. and white striped pottery, and they liked it so Much that several branches were soon nourishing. Meanwhile, he was still designing, and his Plant Pots, stools, cane seats and tables
ere beginning to sell to coffee bars, restaurants and universities. By the late Fif- bles! both a design group and a fabric usiness were doing well, and he had sold bars,'
aYs, and there were certainly no wine
out of the Soup Kitchens to start a more sophisticated restaurant in the King's Road. It was there that he met his future wife, Shirley, who was peering into the restaurant with Lord Queensberry 'when this whey- faced lad in red braces came out and said "Why not come and criticise it from the in- side?" • Mary Quant and Alexander Plunket Green, an old school friend of Conran's, opened Bazaar in 1955 to sell her bold bright clothes to young people. Two years later, their success in designing and retailing led to an opening of a second shop which was done by Conran. But his own furniture was still failing to sell in any quantity. 'There were periods of up to three weeks when we had no work. Then Terence would give us an A4 pad and say "Just do fur- niture designs," or on a really bad night he might come waddling in and say, "Let's go to the pictures".' Only at Woollands, a Knightsbridge store whose bright, contemporary furniture department was quite different from the High Street mausoleums, did he consistent- ly sell well, and it was this, and the success of Bazaar, that led him to think about showing and selling his ideas in an environ- ment of his own choice. Habitat opened in May 1964, staffed by girls with Vidal Sassoon haircuts and Mary Quant dresses, and was an immediate hit with an at last swinging London. 'The Duke of Kent got his foot stuck in a fish kettle and Lord Snowdon would drop by saying "Darling, I only want you to show me around",' while, though it may be hard to believe, 'Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard did their courting in the basement.'
Other stores were soon opened, and within four years the Habitat look was so well established that no self-respecting young middle-class couple were without at least some of those things — peasant chairs, paper lanterns, solid casseroles, stencilled lettering and sensible sisal matting — hat have since become such well-worn cliches throughout the land. With an entrepreneur's ability to pick up a good idea here and a third-world bargain there, he built up a total look from teaspoons to tables that reflected a fresh, unpretentious and practical approach to the home. Since he did this with such instinctive visual flair it is a pity there are not more and better laid out photographs, so that we could see if the goods that stocked the shelves in 1964 would seem dated or still as relevant as ever to the colour-supplement life. But who is this book aimed at anyway? The general reader or the professional designer? At times, it reads like a starry- eyed and somewhat breathless company history, as the author conscientiously catalogues the-di s a s ters changes in management t erge r as, n and d foreignear adven- tures of what has become a huge and com- plex empire. The employees find it hard to keep up and look back with nostalgia to those early days when everybody turned their hands to everything and even Terence sometimes dusted the shelves. Now that
there are personnel training schemes, com- puterised stocks and shops from Toulon to Tokyo, it all seems much like any other big organisation. The turnover has increased from £2.5 million in 1971 to £380 million, and Conran is still on the move. Having launched his museum of design at the Boilerhouse, he has now gone into teenage fashion and publishing.
With such a prodigious appetite for work it seems amazing that he has any time at all for a private life. He does, but so far as this book is concerned it stays private despite the occasional tantalising titbit, such as the executive who when interviewed. said he knew that Conran's wife was on the Observer. Conran looked cross and said, `She's my ex-wife', whereupon the manag- ing director leaned forward and said, 'She's my wife now, actually.'
His influence on the look of our shops and our homes has been so far-reaching that a reaction is inevitable to what has become the uniform look of the suburbs. Today's young trendies may cringe at the sight of an enamelled colander and a wooden salad bowl, but the irony is that the Fifties wire-and-bobble furniture and kitsch ceramics they collect and care for may well be examples of Conran's own early work. Other alternatives, such as hi-tech and pea- sant ethnic, also derive much of their in- spiration from Habitat thinking, and, since Conran shows no signs of slowing down, his vision of a Habitat world looks as if it will one day come true.
Previous page
