In memoriam: At Home in a Changing World

A look back at the life and times for Sir Terence Conran.

As published in the Collab Journal, November 2020

Picture the domestic landscape as Sir Terence Conran once did. Well, you might not have to: perhaps you’re surrounded by a version of it as you read this.

If you’re sitting in an open-plan space, there might be a wall of books dotted with plants and ceramics, illuminated by the soft glow of white paper lampshades in various shapes and sizes, some graphic posters on the wall, and a vibrant scheme of hues where patterns are bold and colors are primary. In the kitchen, surely there’s a sophisticated but affordable system in place for making coffee. Is it all from Ikea? Design Within Reach? Room and Board? Doesn’t matter. It’s likely that most of these objects weren’t necessarily designed, millimeter by millimeter, by Terence Conran in the way that Dieter Rams and Florian Seiffert created the Braun KF 20 coffee machine, for example. He was a gifted textile designer, but more than that he was the merchandiser of a new kind of design lifestyle par excellence. He accomplished this not by advocating for a specific overall scheme the way an interior decorator would do, but by developing a universal framework for modern living—which included food—on a budget, which has proven to be astonishingly resilient over the decades. 

When Terence Conran died aged 88 this September, obituary writers struggled somewhat to convey his complex legacy, which cannot be distilled into the image of a famous coffee pot or set of nesting bowls. He was a restaurateur who introduced great coffee and delicious sandwiches to a grateful British public, he was the impresario of the Habitat and Conran shops where people could find distinctive and stylish goods for their homes without breaking the bank, he was a celebrated book author, he founded the Design Museum in London, and with the offer of a project on his own property decades ago, he gave a young, unknown design school graduate named Thomas Heatherwick his first big break. But he wasn’t Eames-like or even Panton-like in the “iconic chair” sense. What he did for design in Britain, and to a great extent in the United States, was to make it accessibly cosmopolitan. If people in Britain and America happily drink espresso, or cook in ceramic tagines from time to time, snuggle under a duvet, shop for good olive oil, or take visual risks mixing Italian glass with Scandinavian furniture, in large part they have Terence Conran to thank. He was even knighted for it.

Born in 1931, Sir Terence Orby Conran grew up in England during the successive calamities of economic depression and World War II. He came of age in the grim postwar era, when food rationing and bomb sites were part of daily life. He lived abroad in France as a young man and worked as a restaurant dishwasher, observing not only the nuts and bolts of the food business up close, but the sumptuous tastes, smells, textures and colors of continental food and aesthetics. Conran studied textile design in Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, and as a design professional he cut his teeth working on the modern Festival of Britain in 1951, held on the centennial of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace of 1851—a touchstone of the Victorian era. The contrast could not have been more different: nary a hoop skirt or Victorian fringe to be seen, the Festival of Britain introduced a war-weary nation to new technologies, materials, and Modernism. Like its immediate predecessor “Britain Can Make It” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1946, the Festival of Britain was organized around the message that new designs, modern tastes and revitalized manufacturing could (indeed, had to) bring the country back onto a prosperous, peacetime footing.

The Festival of Britain was organized around the message that new designs, modern tastes and revitalized manufacturing could (indeed, had to) bring the country back onto a prosperous, peacetime footing.

Screen-printed furnishing fabric designed by Terence Conran, 1951, made in Lancashire, David Whitehead & Sons Ltd. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

If in 1851 the zenith of the British empire’s scope and influence was still before it, by 1951, it was being dismantled apace and its economic future was deeply uncertain. This wasn’t the first time that Britain had wrestled with its role as a manufacturing hub. The Great Exhibition had, after all, been organized by Prince Albert and industrialist Henry Cole precisely because there was pervasive anxiety about the state of design and manufacturing in Great Britain. The tour de force French Industrial Exposition of 1844 had set everyone’s teeth on edge, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 was staged with the goal of establishing Britain as a global leader not just in raw production but in good design. The Victoria and Albert Museum itself is a legacy of the Exhibition, established not just to enrich the lives of ordinary citizens, but to provide object lessons to the generations of British designers who would draw inspiration from the treasures housed within its walls. 

The creeping unease was triggered by a document. In 1836, a group called the Parliamentary Select Committee on Art and Manufactures issued a report on the state of production and export in Great Britain, and the findings were worrying. Compared with rivals Germany, France, and even the upstart United States, British goods were inferior in form and design. The potential economic consequences could be severe. What followed was a decades long reckoning known as Design Reform. The movement was motivated by economic concern intertwined with a particular 19th century brand of design moralism that would strike most 21st century observers as strange. 

But if you’ve ever been upsold on a product as “handcrafted,” you’ve experienced a version of it yourself. As a consequence of industrialization, new techniques from electroplating to metal casting were making it possible for manufacturers to mimic the look and feel of traditional hand-wrought goods, without the labor or the same set of skills necessitated by the real thing. Printing and weaving technology had likewise given rise to wallpaper and textiles with effusive patterns that appealed to Britain’s burgeoning middle classes. Illusionistic patterns that echoed the grand tableaux of tapestries or gardens in full bloom drew the particular ire of design reformers. Things were easier to make and cheaper to buy, goods were ersatz and junky, and true craftsmen, it was feared, were being left in the dust.

False Principle no. 16, Furnishing cotton fabric made in Lancashire ca. 1850, designer unknown. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

In 1837, the Government Schools of Design were established with a threefold mission for the teaching of young designers: form should come first and decoration second; form should be guided by function and by the unique nature of a specific material; and designs should be inspired by natural and world historical source material, but be distilled into linear forms that aren’t overly-literal. This description makes perfect sense when you think of the work of the 19th century Britain’s design legends: Owen Jones, Christopher Dresser, A. W. N. Pugin, and of course William Morris. The movement’s leading theorist, John Ruskin, wrote that well-crafted goods were the product of happy workers, and that working conditions and craft could not be separated from the quality of the object being produced. (That it later would be separated, by the advent of the assembly line, proved his point.) 

These thinkers and makers produced Arts and Crafts treasures that are still beloved now, but they didn’t transform British taste as thoroughly as they’d hoped. The very manufacturing processes that had tripped the alarm in the first place—casting, printing, industrial weaving—were apt to result in goods bedecked with the sorts of dense pattern and sentimental scenes that the Reformers had railed against. Indeed, rendering a pattern from nature poetically abstract proved more difficult than simply copying it. Arts and crafts goods, like those produced by silversmith Charles Robert Ashbee or William Morris were too costly to become mass-market staples. Indeed, both men were politically progressive, and Morris was an avowed socialist, which complicated matters from a business standpoint.

These thinkers and makers produced Arts and Crafts treasures that are still beloved now, but they didn’t transform British taste as thoroughly as they’d hoped.

Fruit (Pomegranate) Wallpaper designed by William Morris, c. 1866, London, England. Gift of Mrs. Anthony N.B. Garvan, 1970, Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Henry Cole went so far as to curate a room at his new museum that was quickly nicknamed the Chamber of Horrors. Cole believed that the Victoria & Albert Museum should be "schoolroom for everyone,” and the Gallery of False Principles, as he named it, was his master class in What Not to Design. The horrors were largely floral: wallpaper and textiles decorated with naturalistic botanical images that tried too hard to mimic the look of flowers in full bloom. Over-the-top ornamentation came in for condemnation as well. 

At the moment that Cole assembled this didactic display (which is said to have amused, but not convinced visitors) Victorian Britain was in the grips of pteridomania, the “Fern Fever,” and decorative arts producers from Minton to Wedgwood made fern-bedecked wares for an eager audience of amateur cultivators. The desire to control nature, share domestic space with something primitive and wild, either inside a terrarium or more abstractly in the form of a decorative object, was powerful, and only encouraged the mid-19th century ethos of “more is more” when it came to the decoration of a middle class parlor. For a nation of consumers just coming into its own, abundance could give an otherwise ho-hum interior a bit of dazzle, and fern-collecting—like the various animal fancies popular at the time—had the genteel patina of an aristocratic pursuit. 

By the time Terence Conran was growing up in 1930’s Britain, the legacy of the Victorian mania for dense pattern, scenes of ruined castles, and floral excess was well established as respectable good taste, despite the best efforts of Cole and company. Art Deco and early Modernism were chic, but not widespread design strategies for ordinary citizens, and in Britain, as in the United States, shopping was out of reach for millions during the depression and the second world war. And it was slow to catch on for another reason: Modernism, which emerged in the 1920's in continental Europe led by the visionaries of the Bauhaus, took the “chamber of horrors” approach to its logical conclusion by nearly banishing ornament altogether. Ordinary observers tended to find its pared-down, geometric output drab and austere.

Calyx pattern fabric by Lucienne Day, 1951, © Robin and Lucienne Day Foundation. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

By the 1950’s when Conran was a young working designer, a new iteration of Modernism was taking shape in Britain and America; the Eameses and Herman Miller were making it colorful and even fun. At the Festival of Britain, Conran and other young designers like Robin and Lucienne Day, Ernest Race, and Andrew John Milne showed visitors something almost unimaginable: what a cheerful postwar home could look like. Textile patterns by Jacqueline Groag included exactly the sort of stylized floral motifs that would have sent Henry Cole’s spirits soaring, had he lived to see them. Of the designs on view, perhaps Lucienne Day’s beloved Calyx fabric and her husband Robin Day’s futuristic but comfortable Royal Festival Hall lounge chairs were the most lasting design contributions.

Royal Festival Hall lounge chairs, designed by Robin Day, produced by Hille, 1951, in situ at the Royal Festival Hall, 1951. © Robin & Lucienne Day Foundation

Just 20 at the time, Conran must have seen the future at the Festival and realized that good living in postwar Britain wasn't about a particular chair design or fabric pattern per se, it was really about turning outward to the wider world for a taste of la dolce vita. If the height of aspirational sophistication in 1851 was bringing as many ornate objects and exotic plants as possible into a middle class parlor, in 1951 and the decades that followed, it was about bringing the tastes, colors and patterns of the globe into one’s smart—if budget-conscious—flat. If you read through Conran’s many books, particularly The House Book, The Kitchen Book, and The Bed and Bath Book from the 1970s, patterns (yes, even flowers) are everywhere. Each book begins with a global, historical overview of what bedrooms, bathrooms, kitchens and living spaces were like in centuries past, what they might look like in the future, and what they’re like now for people who live in yurts on the Central Asian steppe, or in compact apartments in Tokyo. Conran was not the taste police; there were no proscriptions against design being too literal or too austere; examples of restrained chic are presented alongside frilly clutter, all as different examples of how people have nested with the objects, tools, and mementoes that makes their living spaces home. 

Today, "Conran-style" interiors can be found in the pages of Elle Decor, on Apartment Therapy, in an Ikea catalog, on Instagram, in a “Queer Eye” makeover, and in a Vitsoe or Room & Board showroom. Here you'll see variations on a theme: a space designed to be a container for the domestic exploits of a curious, worldly person. This person has lots of books, magazines and journals, takes care of plants, has posters and ephemera from intriguing experiences or vintage-hunting trips, and enjoys culinary habits influenced by the world at large, if only in small, affordable portions. It's a lived form of cosmopolitanism. It’s fitting that when Collab honored Conran with its Design Excellence Award in 1998, the exhibition that was organized to celebrate the occasion was not one that collected his own designs, but one that he curated from objects in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s renowned design collection. (The title? What else but “Cool Britannia.”) 

And there’s a reason Conran’s death in 2020 might feel especially poignant right now, both in the United Kingdom and here in America. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we can't travel, so our interests in the wider world are confined to the two-dimensional. We scroll social media and read books and perhaps thinking about where we've traveled recently, and where we want to go now, but can't. The only 3D experience, for the most part, are our living spaces, where we can try out recipes, read up on possible adventures, and do something that feels very British indeed: hope for better times to come.