Festival Of Britain Fabric

Festival of Britain Fabric
The 1950s
In 1948 a student from one of England’s more
progressive public schools - Bryanston in Dorset enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts.
His name was Terence Conran, he was just 17 and
he had already demonstrated alongside a keen eye
for design an extraordinary entrepreneurial drive.
As a boy he had traded a model boat he had made
for a metal-turning lathe, sold dolls’ house furniture to
his sister’s friends or pottery to his school masters.
And no sooner had he started a three-year course
in textile design than he was selling his own textile
prints.
Art direction and design for Rayon Magazine
In 1950, Conran quit his course to work for the
architect Dennis Lennon, whose practice was
commissioned to design the interior of a
quarter-scale model of a princess flying boat
for the 1951 Festival of Britain.
“At the start of the Fifties we still had rationing
and there was still a terrible austerity hanging
over the country. The Festival of Britain was
a beacon of hope, but it also started people
thinking in a different way -- not just about
their needs, but about their wants,”
Terence observes.
Soup Kitchens
and the Orrery
In 1953, Terence made his first trip to
The antithesis of the ‘greasy spoon’, it
France. “Anything that was good in
treated restaurant design more like a shop
England at that time was out of reach for
space, with large pictures of old engravings
ordinary people,” he says. “In France,
on the wall, simple fittings - and the
food and other everyday things were
second Gaggia machine in London.
affordable by all.” It was not just availability
but the generosity of display that so
beguiled Terence, and when he returned
he and a friend, Ivan Storey, opened their
first SOUP KITCHEN in Chandos Place.
A year later, Terence adapted the simple
formula - soups for a shilling
silling orora ashilling
shilling
and sixpence a bowl - to create the
Orrery, a coffee bar on the King’s Road,
selling omelettes and, in summer,
barbecues.
Terence created Conran & Company in 1952,
working out of a basement studio in Notting Hill and
selling from a basement showroom in Piccadilly Arcade.
Alongside furniture-making the company also received
commissions for complete designs, among them light
fittings and a showroom for Troughton & Young and
a restaurant called Chanterelle for Walter Baxter
(where Vivien Leigh famously complained about the
quality of light).
Early Conran textiles and prints
Spurred on by the combination of a move to
larger workshops and the potential to charge
clients for designing exhibition stands and shop
fits as well as making them, Terence founded
the Conran Design Group in 1956.
Early clients included the Atomic Energy
Authority and an exhibition for the pharmaceutical
giant, Smith-Kline. CDG quickly expanded its practice
to include graphics, exhibition, furniture and
interior design. This multi-disciplinary approach had
been championed in America by Raymond Loewy,
but in Britain CDG was, along with Allied Design
and DRU the first to embrace such an ethos.
Mary Quant’s famous shop
The 1960s
Whilst the late 1950s had seen great social mobility, the
‘rise of the teenager’ and Harold Macmillan’s famous
proclamation that,“you’ve never had it so good” the
1960s hardly started with a bang. Things were good -but perhaps not so good -- for Terence: he was employing
upwards of 100 staff and the contracts (trade) side of the
business was certainly doing well. With one or two
honourable exceptions, however, Conran furniture was
making few inroads into the domestic interior.
Conran’s skills as a salesman could only do so much,
whilst his knack for marketing landed him in hot water
with the Society of Industrial Artists, who considered
CDG’s 1961 newsletter to conflict with the interests of
other members. A sign of the not-so liberated times
is that the SIA, when asked by Terence how else he
might go about finding work for his company, suggested
he join a gentlemen’s club in Pall Mall.
Under the direction of its chairman, George McWatters,
and packaging, vehicle liveries and offices. CDG produced
Harveys of Bristol commissioned CDG to undertake a
for Harvey’s one of the first corporate identity manuals,
massive review of its corporate identity. The review and
with instructions on the use of typography, logo and
subsequent rebranding took three years and included the
colours to ensure that the company’s image remained
company’s shops, off-licenses, bottles
consistent.
In the cellars of Harvey’s Bristol offices,
Conran designed and built a 7,000 square
foot restaurant. Rather than disguise the
rough bricks and masonry, Terence and his
design team simply painted them white,
adding Hans Wenger chairs, large prints, a
ship’s figurehead to act as a focal point and an open-plan kitchen where
customers could see their food
being cooked.
Thetford factory
New Pastures
Just as CDG to some extent took its ethos from
American designers such as Loewy, so Terence was
inspired by American manufacturers such as Knoll and
Herman Miller who produced modern, high-end,
mass-produced furniture in modern surroundings. Under
the Expanding Town Scheme run by the London County
Council, a new factory was built to Conran’s
specifications in Thetford, Norfolk. The new building
occupied 40,000 square feet in three acres of ground,
and it opened in 1963, with about 80 families making the
move from London to Norfolk.
New machinery enabled Conran not only to expand
the range of furniture it made, but also the volume.
With the majority of furniture shops still frustratingly
mired in the past and stuffed full of dark,
faux-Victorian monstrosities - at least to Terence’s
eye - something had to be done to find a way to
fulfill the new factory’s manufacturing potential.
Soon after a range of packflat furniture was launched
and sold to retailers throughout the UK.
Terence Donovan Photograph
habitat
From the outset, Habitat set out to be more than just
a furniture store. Conran believed that people who
shopped in Bazaar and who read the Sunday Times
colour supplement (launched in 1962) would want to
express their personalities in their homes as much as
through their clothes.
“It was never designed as a static business,” he says.
“It was designed to be constantly changing, with new
looks and new ideas. However, classic cookware and
furniture was the predominant base of it all.”
Having finally found a site on the Fulham Road
(previously a pub called the Admiral Keppel,
immediately across the road from the then run-down
Michelin Building), Habitat opened on 11 May 1964.
Staff wore uniforms by Mary Quant and had their hair
cut by Vidal Sassoon; Terence Donovan was on hand
to take photographs. People seemed readily to identify
with the style of life that Habitat embodied, a world
in which more women worked and people increasingly
took holidays abroad.
With products packed and stacked on high, the shop
acted as both as retail space and warehouse. Although
Conran & Company had been making the Summa range
of flat-pack furniture since the move the Thetford retail
sales had been poor. Terence had always believed that
this was mainly because traditional furniture shops just
didn’t know how to display and sell his designs.
With Habitat, he was in control - customers responded
enthusiastically to furniture they could take away and
assemble themselves, just as they did to the labour-saving
duvet and the simple chicken-brick.
Habitat’s success was palpable: a second
shop opened on the Tottenham Court
Road in 1965, and by 1968 there were
four shops in London as well as one in
Manchester.
The 1970s
More than anything else, for Conran
the 1970s were about the consolidation
of Habitat: when its largest store to date
opened on the King’s Road in 1973,
the same night as Biba’s huge South
Kensington store, there were a total of
18 shops across the country. Yet that
same year, the first Habitat opened in
Paris whilst back in London the first
Conran Shop opened in November 1973
on the site of the original Habitat; New
York followed in October 1977.
In spite of this drive, there was, apparently, still time
for significant diversionary activities: in partnership with
one of his CDG designers, Oliver Gregory, and the art
dealer, Kasmin, Terence opened the Neal Street
Restaurant in 1971, his first since the Orrery in 1954,
whilst in 1974, Mitchell Beazley published Terence
Conran’s original House Book, a distinct forerunner
of the iconic Habitat catalogue.
David Hockney Menu
The Original House Book, 1976
Neal Street Restaurant
“Everybody who likes food is interested in having a
restaurant,” reckons the art dealer, John Kasmin, and so
perhaps was born The Neal Street Restaurant, which
opened underneath CDG’s offices in a converted banana
warehouse in Covent Garden. Famed for its menus
designed by David Hockney and now owned by Terence’s
sister, Priscilla and her husband, Antonio Carluccio, it has
hardly changed its look in 35 years. “It’s one of the
designs I am most proud of,” Conran says.
Although Covent Garden is high on the list of London’s
significantly, for the renovation of the Michelin Building;
top tourist attractions, in the early Seventies, it
the regeneration of Butlers Wharf was championed
was largely neglected. As so often, Conran’s gut
almost single handedly by Conran, in opposition to the
instinct for a project has been uncannily prescient
disbelief of property developers and investors; whilst
of change to come, if not the catalyst itself. The
London’s second Conran Shop on Marylebone High
area Londoners now know as Brompton Cross would
Street has been an anchor for the rejuvenation of
perhaps not enjoy such a nomenclature were it not
the area.
first for the original Habitat and later, and most
Habitat abroad
On 1 January 1973, the UK
joined the Common Market
(essentially what is now the
EU) and with that Conran
began seriously to pursue
a plan to expand Habitat
into France. Whilst in Britain,
Habitat was associated with
French kitchenware and
Scandinavian furniture, in
France it was none the less
seen as essentially English,
albeit in an updated
mini-car-and-mini-skirts
idiom.
As always, the site of the first shop was not an
obvious one. The Tour Montparnasse building
was seen as something of an eye-sore, yet it was
also a transport hub easily accessible to millions
of Parisians. Whilst most products were the same
as those sold in the UK, Conran Associates developed a range of products specifically for the
French market. And where Habitat in the UK had
introduced items such as the garlic press to the
mainstream, so in France it had huge success with
the humble pie funnel -- a simple illustration of
the Conran ethos that, “people do not always
know what they want until you offer it to them.”
Some four years later, Conran’s opened in the
Citicorp Center in Manhattan, the Habitat name
having to be dropped due to the name Habitat
already being registered. Mixing core Habitat
product with those made, adapted or sourced for
the local market, the aim was to appeal to
homemakers whose tastes aspired to the likes of
Charles & Ray Eames, Herman Miller and Knoll -but whose wallets were rather more limited.
Habitat catalogue
Although Habitat produced its first catalogue
in the Sixties, early versions were modestly
produced in modest quantities in black and white.
In the early Seventies, Conran began working on
what started out as an in-house training manual for
Habitat staff. The project grew and grew until
Conran and his designer, Stafford Cliff, found a
publisher to take on its production. The House
Book anticipates the phenomenon of the glossily
illustrated coffee-table book, but combines it with
an almost missionary zeal for information and
education. Far from being an overnight success, the
book achieved eventual sales in excess of 2 million
copies largely through word-of-mouth and a
well-placed plug in the New York Magazine.
Soon, Habitat catalogues had acquired a similarly
comprehensive inclusivity as well as an
extraordinary print-run. Like the stores themselves,
the catalogues promoted a particular style of life.
Adopting the practices of fashion retailers, they also
adopted a “this goes with that” approach to create
a number of distinct looks.
Michelin House &
The Conran Shop
The first Conran Shop opened in 1973 on the
Fulham Road site of the original Habitat. Opposite
it lay the Michelin Building, built in 1911 as the
headquarters for the Michelin tyre company. When
the opportunity arose to buy the building, it was
too good to miss.
Conran Roche produced a scheme that restored
the facade of the building to its original splendour,
whilst creating a glass-fronted building behind it
with retail and office space.
The 1980s
Although he objected to many of Margaret
Thatcher’s policies on both a personal and
a political level, the growth of Terence Conran’s
businesses through the Eighties would not have
been what it was were it not for the prevailing
social, political and economic environment
that Mrs Thatcher and her government fostered.
Indeed, by floating Habitat on the London Stock
Exchange in 1981, Conran opened up one of
his businesses for the first time to market forces.
The expansion of the retail businesses was
at once an opportunity to bring affordable,
good design to high streets across Britain but
also dangerously Promethean.
The Conran Foundation (established in 1981)
sought to educate schoolchildren and the public
alike in the importance of industrial design to the
quality of daily life, and almost wholly funded the
Design Museum, which opened as part of Conran
Roche’s redevelopment of Butlers Wharf in 1989.
Conran Octopus books -- a joint venture with the
publisher, Paul Hamlyn -- started in 1983 with
a vision to produce educational, but inspiring books
about interiors, gardening and cookery, whilst in
1985 Conran set up Benchmark, a furniture-making
company in the grounds of his house in Berkshire.
The retail revolution:
Habitat-Mothercare
In 1982, Habitat took over Selim Zilkha’s
Mothercare, a chain of more than 400 shops in
Britain, Europe and the USA. John Stephenson
was asked to head up a new Habitat Mothercare
Design Group that would run independently
of Conran Associates, with the latter now
concentrating on work for external clients.
The roll-out of a new look across some 200
stores in the UK was as swift as it was thorough:
packaging, signage, graphics and shop-fit were
brought together using a palette of powder
colours that managed to be modern rather than
insipid. Although it took slightly longer, product
design was also overhauled, including a range
of designs by Sebastian Conran that included
a push-chair in which the baby faced its parents.
At the same time, Habitat revived a cherished idea
of Terence’s from the 1970s: Habitat Basics were
just what they said on the label: simple, functional
and above all affordable. The concept was so
successful in Japan that Seibu -- the department
store that franchised Habitat -- developed
the “no brand” formula to create Muji.
The retail revolution:
Storehouse
In 1981, Conran Associates were
engaged by the menswear chain,
J Hepworth & Son, where Terence was
chairman, to refurbish their 120 shops.
At almost exactly the same time,
Hepworth’s acquisition of the Kendalls
chain provided an opportunity for the
company to expand into womenswear.
Along with Hepworth’s new
merchandising director, George Davies,
Conran developed the concept for
one of the biggest retails successes
of the last 25 years: Next
“We wanted the shops to be flexible because we
wanted to show how to put things together in
different ways to make a wardrobe,” Terence said.
“The look was to be clean and fresh and bright.
The clever thing was that the clothes looked
upmarket, but were very reasonably priced.”
The Design Museum
With some of the money he made from the
floatation of Habitat, Terence Conran created the
Conran Foundation, a charitable trust committed
to the promotion of industrial design. One of its
most public early manifestations was the
Boilerhouse, which took its name from the
Boilerhouse location -- “a hole in the ground” -it occupied within the Victoria & Albert Museum.
Designed by Conran Associates, the space housed
a succession of publicity- and audience-grabbing
exhibitions... much to the chagrin of the Museum’s
director, Sir Roy Strong, with whom Conran had
clashed in the past.
In 1983, Conran bought an 11-acre site known as
Butlers Wharf on the south bank of the Thames.
Conran & Partners began masterplanning the area
as a mixed-use development of more than one
million square feet of retail, work and living space
that included the conversion of a 1950s warehouse
into an all-white, Modernist building that would
house the world’s first Design Museum. Despite
opposition from, among others, the Prince
of Wales, who suggested a pitched roof would
make the plan more environmentally sympathetic,
the Museum opened in 1989, with its own
restaurant -- Blue Print cafe -- on the first floor
with unrivalled views of Tower Bridge and the
Thames.
As the Eighties progressed, Conran was involved in
design work for the Burton's group, which grew to
include Debenhams. But it was the £1.2 billion
merger of Habitat-Mothercare with British Homes
Stores in 1986 with which Conran is most
associated. As with Mothercare before, the initial
focus was on areas where changes could be made
quickly. At the heart of the rebranding was the
change from British Home Stores -- with its rather
dowdy, post-War connotations -- into BhS, with its
rather jaunty lower-case ‘h’.
Changing the internal culture of BhS proved
more of a challenge, but by the end of the
Eighties, Storehouse’s portfolio included BhS,
Habitat, Mothercare, Heal’s, The Conran Shop,
Richard Shops, Blazer and Conran & Partners.
In 1987, The Conran Shop crossed the
road to its new home on Fulham Road.
The Shop had always been something
of a dream project for Terence.
Originally, it has been something of
a test ground for products that might
have been too specialist for Habitat,
either by reason of their price or their
design (or both). But at 30,000 square
feet, the new Conran Shop tripled its
floor space and became perhaps the
purest expression of what is now
called “Conranstyle” -- a carefully
edited combination of modern classics
and new and interesting products
sourced from around the world.
Just as early adopters of Habitat felt as if they
were members of a club, so customers at
The Conran Shop used the Michelin Building
as an informal weekend meeting spot. At the
entrance to the original building and on the
first floor behind its splendid, stained-glass
windows of the cigar-touting Monsieur Bibendum,
Conran and co-owner Paul Hamlyn created
Bibendum oyster bar and restaurant,
with Simon Hopkinson in the kitchen.
Seat covers changed colour with the seasons,
whilst everything from the table legs to the
plates to the ashtrays referenced the heritage
of the extraordinary space.
The 1990s
If the 1980s witnessed a design revolution on the
British high street, the Nineties presided over
similarly extraordinary changes to the restaurant
industry. Once again, Conran played a leading role,
not always to the delight of critics and the
chattering classes. None the less, where British
cooking had long been the joke of the world, by
the late Nineties, American Gourmet magazine could
declare London the restaurant capital of the world
without incurring universal - indeed, any - ridicule.
Equally, just as the Eighties had seen Terence Conran
embrace market forces -- both benefiting and suffering
from the vagaries of shareholder demands -- so in 1990
he retired as Chairman of Storehouse, bought back The
Conran Shop and refocused his attention on building
a portfolio of businesses that he could nurture with a
hand-picked team of people who shared his tastes and
obsession for detail.
Butlers wharf
gastrodrome
The property crash of 1990 sent Butlers Wharf into
administrative receivership, yet this did not deflect
Conran personally nor Conran Roche from the general
masterplan for the area. Property experts of all guises
were convinced that the project was doomed, that
Londoners - and, crucially, those who worked in the City
- would not cross the river to eat or live or work.
Undeterred, Conran set about the creation of a
Whilst not an overnight success, Butlers Wharf has
“Gastrodrome”, “a collection of food-related
defied the sceptics. Conran opened two more
activities which appeal to those who are particularly
restaurants -- Cantina del Ponte in 1992 and Butlers
interested in the variety and quality of food and drink”.
Wharf Chop House in 1993 -- and although others were
Anchoring the development was Le Pont de la Tour
slower to follow, the riverfront is now awash with
(1991), a bar-grill, restaurant and private dining-room with
competing bars and restaurants.
satellite wine merchant and food store. Inspired by the
second-class dining-rooms of the Normandie liner, the
design took a 19th-century fin-de-siecle aesthetic and
cleverly updated it to the end of the 20th century.
The depths of an economic recession are not widely
Conran’s vision was to create a 20th-century version of
held to be conducive to the opening of a high-risk,
the buzzing, classic Parisian brasserie. Prevailing wisdom
high-investment business. Prophets of Doom had buried
had it that if Londoners wanted big, busy restaurants,
Conran’s next venture before it even opened: whilst
there would be plenty already. Yet Quaglino’s became
Quaglino’s, like so many Conran projects before it, had an
what Egon Ronay dubbed, “an epoch-defining restaurant”
illustrious history, its heyday had been some 50 or 60
that scooped awards for both its design and its food.
years earlier.
Taking into consideration the site and
characteristics of both the building and
the neighbourhood, Conran & Partners
and Conran Restaurants embarked on
an ambitious expansion through the 1990s
that included Mezzo in Soho, Sartoria
on Savile Row, the Bluebird Gastrodrome
on the King’s Road, and a new Orrery,
this time a “neighbourhood restaurant”
on Marylebone High Street.
Big in Japan
One of the most improbable successes has been that
of The Conran Shop in Japan. The original store (there
are now four) opened in the Shinjuku Park Tower
in1994 under a franchise agreement with Tokyo Gas.
Whilst the Tower is a landmark building by Kenzo Tange
with the spectacular Tokyo Park Hyatt occupying
the summit of its three towers, The Conran Shop enjoys
neither shop windows nor external signage. None-theless it has become a destination for design-conscious
Japanese.
Alongside the success of The Conran Shop, the Mori
Building Company has commissioned Conran & Partners
on various projects. The spectacular Ark Hills Club
commands the prime space at the top of the company’s
headquarters: part gallery for the Chairman’s unrivalled
collection of sketches, paintings and models by
Le Corbusier, part ultra-exclusive private members’ club,
the design pivots on an axis between oriental and
occidental, with traditional Japanese spaces to the east
and a more European aesthetic to the west.
The 2000s
At the start of the new millennium, Conran & Partners is,
And whilst there are specialist practitioners within C&P,
in many ways, remarkably true to the original ethos of
there is frequently a holistic approach to design solutions:
Conran Design Group: a multi-disciplinary practice that
location, environment, exterior architecture, materials,
offers a range of services both to external clients and to
interior design, light, space, product and graphics all
companies within the Conran group. Its signatures are
connect as if - to use another famous phrase of Terence’s
honesty, authenticity and modernity, combined, of course,
- chosen by “one pair of eyes”.
with Terence Conran’s enduring belief that good design
improves the quality of everyday life.
Architecture - hotels
C&P’s experience of hotel design first developed in the
1990s with work on Das Trieste in Vienna and the original
MyHotel in Bloomsbury, London. However, it was with
the Great Eastern Hotel in the City of London that it
faced its biggest hotel project to date. One of the grand
railway hotels of the Victorian age, the Great Eastern is
Grade II listed and presented many challenges. Not the
least of these was to link the main building on Liverpool
Street to an extension on the corner of Bishopsgate,
which - until the refurbishment in 2000 - required guests
to walk between the two by going outside and walking
down the street. The solution - a towering six-storey
atrium - provides the hotel with a signature space that
challenges expectations of what might hide behind the
rather staid Victorian facade.
For the Park Hotels group in India, C&P completely
transformed the property in Bangalore to create one of
India’s first boutique hotels, as well as providing the whole
group with a new graphic identity that allowed for subtle
differences to reflect the character of each individual
hotel.
Park Hotel Bangalore
Bedroom
Urban renewal
Conran has a history of seeing potential where more
In 2006, C&P published a bold blueprint for mixed-use
mainstream people and businesses simply see neglect. It
live-work developments that tackle the dual challenges of
is difficult to imagine how what we now call Brompton
affordable housing and the growth in single-person
Cross was once considered a backwater, that Butlers
households.
Wharf was for many years home to a few artists and
squatters and a lot more rats, or that Marylebone High
Street was looking rather tired and shabby. Trends that
started in London -- to reclaim and reinvest in run-down
central locations -- has been repeated in other parts of
the country. Conran & Partners has worked closely with
City Lofts on projects in London, Manchester, Brighton,
Harrogate, Reading, Newcastle and Salford.
Product
Best known, perhaps, for turning the humble ashtray
into something akin to a status symbol -- think of the
Quaglino’s ‘Q’, the Sartoria tape measure or the St
George’s flag, all produced on behalf of Conran
Restaurants -- the product designers at Conran &
Partners have a vast range of experience, designing
everything from sofas and armchairs to bathroom
ranges (including the award-winning Aveo range for
Villeroy & Bosch) to baby’s buggies.
In the last few years, C&P has worked with clients to
extent sensibility, with African influences and
develop some hugely successful product ranges: Nigella
a commitment to source all of the manufacturing
Lawson’s Living Kitchen is at once practical and modern,
within Africa itself.
and yet evocative of traditional styles, “like toys for
grown-ups,” as Nigella describes it. By contrast, bY
Homeware designed for Sainsbury’s is a more
uncompromisingly monochrome range that is practical,
durable and no-nonsense. And just as all of the new
furniture for the Park Hotel, Bangalaore, was made using
local manufacturers and suppliers, so C&P’s work for
Woolworth's in South Africa to create a huge range of
homeware combined European design and, to some
Architecture:
restaurants
The cathedral-like space of Bridgemarket, under the 59th
Street Bridge in New York City, is undoubtedly impressive,
but presented very specific design challenges.
Guastavino’s is one of New York’s premium event spaces
that can be used for a variety of purposes without
Guastavino’s restaurant, New York
compromising the drama of the space.
By contrast, Floridita in London’s Soho references the
original, legendary Floridita in Havana, but without
becoming a pastiche. Like Guastavino’s, Floridita has
picked up some impressive awards for its design and
execution. The food and drink menus and the music, as
with the restaurant design, have strong Cuban and Latin
American influences whilst retaining a signature all of their
own and paying attention to every little detail.
50 years have passed since Terence opened his first
design group in the Northend Road Fulham. Much
has happened since then when he had two or
three clients and three designers.
Have a look at the current list of projects which
Conran & Partners are handling around the world.
conran & partners architecture
conran collections
I would like to thank all the thousands of designers who have
worked with us over the last fifty years and in particular John
Stephenson, Oliver Gregory, Jean Francois Bentz and currently
Richard Doone who have managed the Design Groups so well
over the years.
Thank you,
picture credits