RIP Sir Terence Conran

In the late 1970’s, I took the train into Manhattan to visit my oldest friend in the world. Her parents had recently sold their house in our suburban enclave on Long Island and moved to a brand-new apartment tower on 57th Street and Second Avenue. We were in college and her parents moved while we were away at school.

I wanted to see her new apartment and explore her midtown east-side neighborhood. She said we had to visit Conran’s in the newly-erected Citicorp Center. An office skyscraper and headquarters for Citibank, the building —itself an architectural wonder — incorporated a retail and restaurant mecca, the first to house an international food court and upscale indoor mall. Conran’s was the first store to open in this novel marketplace and the first retail venue I experienced to merchandise home goods in the warehouse style. This immense two-story, glass-enclosed space, displaying simple, yet colorful, inexpensive goods on open shelving with industrial lighting, was truly revolutionary.

Early view of the Design Research building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

View of the Citicorp Center (now known as the Citigroup Center) from the East River of New York City.

Of course, Sir Terence was not the first to introduce this style of merchandising to the United States. Eleven years before he opened his first store, Habitat, in London, Benjamin Thompson — the architect and educator at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design — founded the design firm and store, Design Research or D/R, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. D/R pioneered the retail warehouse style here and advanced our taste in Scandinavian modernism. Brands like Marimekko and designs by Marcel Breuer, Hans Wegner, and Alvar Aalto owe their amplification in the American design lexicon to D/R. But it was Sir Terence Conran who brought this design style to the masses.

Like Edith Wharton before him, and Martha Stewart after, Terence Conran was a tastemaker who created a lifestyle. An Englishman, Conran sojourned to France in his early 20s, and later to Spain and Italy, which opened his eyes to food, wine and different shopping experiences. He recognized that a younger generation in post-war Britain wanted a different lifestyle than that of their parents and had money to afford it. After opening two restaurants, he launched Habitat, selling furniture along with wares from all over the world. Said Conran, “The secret of Habitat’s early success was that it sold quite a lot of affordable but iconic products alongside the furniture – everything from paper lanterns to chopping boards, and people quickly realised that by buying a few of them you could completely refresh your home.”

Conran’s aesthetic was simple. He aimed to design and promote useful and affordable products that looked beautiful. Known for introducing the duvet and bringing flat-pack furniture to the U.S. well before IKEA, Conran expanded his empire to include stores, restaurants, a publishing company and an architectural firm. He authored numerous lifestyle books — basically how-to’s for furnishing, gardening and cooking in his inimitable style. He was instrumental in starting and funding the Design Museum, an archive of modern design in Britain, an endeavor he proclaimed to be his crowning achievement.

Although we credit Sir Terence for his design expertise, perhaps he deserves more accolades for his business acumen. “‘He was the first retailer to understand the genius of the total environment,’ says Paco Underhill, author of Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, ‘the first to use furniture to help sell something else.’”

When I moved from New York to Boston in 1993, Sir Terrence had embarked on resurrecting the derelict space under the Queensboro/59th Street Bridge in Manhattan and reviving it into a food and restaurant emporium. He had sold off the stateside Conran’s stores; indeed, by 1994, Conran’s in the Citicorp Center had closed. But the idea came to him to reinvent a Conran’s Shop in this lofty space known as Bridgemarket. He had already succeeded in resurrecting architectural treasures as restaurants in his native England. Sadly, his reinvented Conran’s Shop now houses a TJ Maxx. But were I a New Yorker when Bridgemarket reopened in 1999, I’m sure I would have viewed it with the same wonder that I experienced when first seeing Conran’s at the Citicorp Center.

Thank you, Sir Terence Conran, for cultivating my, and countless others’, eye for design.