“How can you not have insurance?”
“Because I spent my money on the Clapco D29, the most impenetrable lock on the market today. It has only one design flaw, the door must be closed!”
Terence Conran says recession boosts design
Sir Terence Conran is the “people’s designer”, who has been selling style to the nation for more than fifty years. In the Sixties, when he opened the first Habitat in Chelsea the staff wore uniforms designed by Mary Quant and the public learnt to love flatpack furniture and modern lines.
Photo by 挪威 企鵝
In the 1970s he poured primary colours into middle-class homes, in the 1980s he spread the minimalist message to the chattering classes. By the 1990s he was educating the country about porcini and polenta in his restaurants and promoting Cool Britannia.
As the recession bites, other retailers and restaurateurs are going to the wall, but Sir Terence seems to be thriving. He has just opened a new restaurant — Boundary, in Shoreditch — and he reports that sales of furniture at the Conran Shop are up by 35 per cent on last year. Although he is 78 it is clear that he has no intention of retiring. He has just agreed to be a business ambassador for Gordon Brown and will soon fly to Tokyo to promote British design. “My brief is the creative industries,” he says. “They are huge cash earners. The Government wants me to let the world know what we have to offer.”
When we meet in his warehouse flat overlooking the Thames near Tower Bridge, he is dressed in an open-necked blue shirt and puffing on a large cigar — “I’m trying to save the Cuban economy,” he says.
The recession will, he believes, purge the dross from the high street. “Those businesses that you scratch your head and say — well, why are they there? It does eliminate them, although I’m always sad to see anything go.” He was once offered the chairmanship of Woolworths, which he turned down, and he thinks the company missed a trick. “I always liked the name. I thought there was a great opportunity to have a company making very good-value wool products.”
Wedgwood’s demise did not surprise him. A few years ago he told the directors: “You’re making products that nobody uses. Maybe some of them look pretty sitting in a corner cupboard waiting for the auntie who gave them to you for your wedding present to come to tea but there’s nothing that you would buy to use for breakfast, lunch or supper. There’s nothing for people to break and replace.”
There will, he thinks, be “a lot more” casualties by the end of the year. “Probably the luxury end will remain strong,” he says. “The vulnerable shops will be the ones that are selling the same sort of thing that’s sold just up the high street so it’s all about price.”
He hopes that the recession will be the catalyst for a new generation of companies that emphasise good design. “The Thatcher idea of being a service-led economy works in good times, but doesn’t work in bad times. Who wants to live in a country that doesn’t make anything? In the 1950s and 60s we all started businesses because of frustration that we couldn’t find anywhere to sell our designs.”
Sir Terence has already survived several recessions — which is why the Prime Minister is keen to tap into his expertise. But the retail guru thinks that the Government has already got things wrong. The VAT cut was, in his view, a waste of money. “I don’t think it provided the stimulus that they hoped it would,” he says. “Not a lot of it got passed on to the consumer … I said to Peter Mandelson, ‘You’ve got it the round the wrong way. You should have told people that VAT was going up on January 1. They’d have had to rush and buy.’”
Sir Terence is instinctively frugal. He is attached to his frayed shirts and always eats up leftovers. “I get very irritated if I see good food put in the bin. And I take no notice of sell-by dates. Only the other day I had a wonderful tin of French duck confit, it was way out of date but I opened it up and it was perfect … I grew up in the war. If you were always hungry as a child you don’t waste.”
Surprisingly for a retailer, he finds the consumerist culture distasteful. “Consumerism did go too far, especially in the supermarket. It was just a greed thing. People would load up the trolley and then when they got home there was nowhere to store the stuff so it made homes cluttered. It was daft that banks didn’t say look, credit card debt is getting out of control. And why didn’t the Government say people are getting themselves into debt and they don’t have a chance of paying it off?”
It may not have been a vote winner to discourage shopping. But, he says, “this recession is not exactly a vote winner either, is it? There is a place called the Treasury, which is meant to spot this sort of thing.” There should have been more controls on the City. “The Treasury and the Bank of England should have said, ‘We can sense, we can smell problems on the horizon, do something about it’ … And there was an opportunity to try and call a halt to house price increases.”
It was of course Mr Brown who was Chancellor for the past ten years. Sir Terence thinks that the Prime Minister should be more open about errors that were made. “I’m a supporter of Gordon Brown, he’s a man I like very much, but he has got to take responsibility for having been Chancellor during the boom years and not doing enough to temper the boom,” he says. “Never having been in politics, I don’t know why he can’t — in real life, you say, ‘I made this mistake and I’m sorry for it’. He certainly shouldn’t have sold the gold, for instance.”
When asked whether he thinks the Government spent too much money in the good years leaving nothing for the downturn, he replies: “Yes.” The recapitalisation of the banks was not well handled. “All this money has gone into the banks and if you go to the bank and want to get finance for a project, it doesn’t seem to be available. I don’t think it’s been very well tied up and if I was lending money to you I would attach some pretty strong ropes. And all this about bonuses. They should be saying to RBS, ‘You will not pay bonuses’. If I owned 70 per cent of a company, I, as a shareholder, would set down the rules.”
Although he was a champion of Cool Britannia in 1997, Sir Terence fell out with Tony Blair over the war in Iraq. “I thought that was one of the most appalling things that government has ever done to a nation, where a nation had demonstrated it didn’t want to go to war, to find ways of sliding through it all.”
He has, he says, never given money to the Labour Party but he “gave time and I would give time again”. Although the Conran Shop did a display for the recent Tory black-and-white ball, he says that he could never back the Conservatives. “I’m a Labour tribalist. I’ve always been a socialist and I guess I’ll always remain a socialist.” He is not a blind loyalist though. “I know politicians make mistakes but it would be nice if sometimes they held their hand up.”
It must be irritating for retailers to see the banks who created the mess getting bailed out while other companies go to the wall. He does not think there should be handouts for everyone. “The banks are fundamental to the economy … but unless the banks get on and start using this cash to help to finance businesses it’s wasted.”
It’s not just the high street that is in trouble. The chef Antony Worrall Thompson was one recent victim of the recession. Sir Terence would be glad to see the end of celebrity chefs. “It’s all got completely out of hand,” he says. “A chef’s job is to be in his kitchen, not in some television studio. And he shouldn’t be swearing at people the whole time. I always try and design our kitchens so they’re open so the chefs and the waiting staff can’t swear at each other.”
Gordon Ramsay may be a good cook, but he says: “When was the last time he did any chefing?” But he admits that he is “all for” Nigella Lawson “being sexy” with spaghetti on TV. “Anything that educates people about food is a good thing. There was a time when the greatest excuse of tourists not to come to the UK was because the food was so horrible. I love jellied eels. I don’t like overcooked cabbage.” Now he says: “I really do think you can get better food in London than you can in Paris.”
What about the British sense of style? “I haven’t got a shell suit. I think it changes. If you go round M&S today you can dress yourself pretty decently, which wasn’t always the case — people’s taste is formed by what they are offered and if they are offered crap then they dress in crap.” The same applies to interior design. Habitat has “lost its way” since it was bought by Ikea. “I think they should choose the best out of Ikea and put it on the high street. Ikea is remarkably good value — although would sacrifice a bit of the low price to improve the service.”
His real bugbear is the design of modern houses. “I hope the recession will stop all that ersatz Tudor-beathan ridiculous stuff,” he says. “It seems bizarre that there is this new Tudor-beathan house being put up by one of the mass house builders, yet in front of that house is a rather intelligently designed car and inside there is good audiovisual equipment, good kitchen equipment. It’s only the house that holds it all that is still so out of date.”
And with that, Sir Terence is gone to make a call to Mary Quant.
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