Sir Terence Conran: Modernism’s shining knight

It has been a long journey from the early days of Habitat in the Sixties to his position of high priest of design in his eyrie at Shad Thames on London’s South Bank. But Sir Terence Conran has never stopped creating lifestyles, developing urban value out of dereliction and turning our homes into tools for living.

His age has progressed in tandem with modernism, the big set of ideas that fuelled him from the start. Now that he is 79, does he feel modernism has finally come of age? Have we reached a stage where, rather than reject homes of glass and steel built with industrial forms and materials, we embrace them? Has the desire for fitness for purpose and the machine-age aesthetic finally settled into our culture, along with the miniskirt, the bentwood chair and the garlic crusher?

“I think modernism has come of age, not to the golf club fraternity in the way we all hoped, though,” Sir Terence says. “Young people who like living in cities now like open-plan, loft-style living. Frankly, they find it difficult to move on into Tudorbethan mass-produced little boxes.”

But even so, they cannot all live in modernist buildings. “People don’t get the chance to live in the Villa Savoye, which is the house I would most like to inhabit in the whole world.” He refers to Le Corbusier’s seminal house built as a “machine for living” in Poissy, France, in 1929. Sir Terence has always wanted us to have a sense of place, as he found when he travelled through France in the Fifties. “The architecture, the wonderful little villages, bakeries, cafés, we didn’t have them,” he says.

Modernist design has probably crept into our lives via loft conversions, and while most of us live in conventional houses, we like the look that he describes.

“The number of houses which are converted to provide modernist interiors is considerable,” Sir Terence says. He is right – we like the glass cube on the back of the Victorian terrace. He lives in an 18th-century mansion near Newbury, West Berkshire, that has been transformed to suit his modern tastes and he has been gutting a London mews for himself and his wife, Vicki. “Georgian proportions are perfect, like modernist proportions,” he says.

Modernist houses are no longer like Marmite – something you love or hate. One enterprising estate agency called The Modern House was established in 2003 solely to handle modern marvels. “We saw a lot of very interesting houses being marketed in quite the wrong way by local estate agents trying to make them look ‘normal’,” the agency’s Albert Hill says. “They need beautiful photography, lots of explanation, history and context.”

Modernism has also been helped by changing fashion. The technological revolution has ushered in a love of the sleek. The colours and shapes of the Fifties and Sixties are fashionable again. In his lifetime, Sir Terence has seen the role of the designer develop from “industrial artist” to whole-life packager and marketer. What is he best known for? “The chicken brick,” he says gleefully. “But I am proudest of the duvet.”

The Conran Partnership, the architectural arm of his empire, has its offices in a glass cube one road back from the Thames. He prowls behind a huge desk on the fourth floor, smoking cigars like a newspaper baron. He has a lynx-like elegance, wears a sharp, electric-blue jacket and is master of all he surveys.

Flanking the cobbles of Shad Thames are the Victorian warehouses he rescued from dereliction in the Eighties. Chefs are busy in Butler’s Wharf Chop House, Le Pont de la Tour and the Cantina del Ponte. Tourists queue for the Design Museum and freshly baked artisan bread wafts from the deli. As you walk through one of the most atmospheric parts of the capital, you absorb the creative flair of the man on the fourth floor with every step.

“It was one of the great moments of my life, realising I could afford to buy over 13 acres on this bank of the river in the early Eighties,” he says. “If you asked a taxi driver for Butler’s Wharf then, they had no idea where it was. There were just a lot of rats and a couple of mad artists living here.”

His plans were hit hard by the recession but even so the area reeks of money, with flats selling for £1 million to £3 million. It is proof that design and vision create value where there was none before.

“It was right by the City, but estate agents didn’t understand it. I told them of my dream for a gastrodome along the river and they gave me stern looks and said: ‘Don’t you know that the City will not cross the bridge to the South Bank?’ ” Sir Terence smiles. He isn’t modest and why should he be?

“We changed the South Bank,” he says. “Tate Modern would never have put itself into Bankside if it hadn’t seen the success of Butler’s Wharf and our little Design Museum.” Plans are afoot to move the museum, which he helped establish, into the Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington. The re-creation of Heals, the establishment of The Conran Shop and restaurants, from Bibendum in South Kensington to the Boundary at Shoreditch, have also been part of his campaign to encourage Britain to enjoy the good things in life.

His greatest disdain is reserved for estate agents. “Builders and mortgage lenders consult them and their advice is always that they will find anything with a modern design difficult to sell. They say people don’t want it. But people don’t have the choice because so few modern developments are built.”

As the writer Fiona McCarthy put it, Sir Terence “perceptively exploits urban restlessness”. Shad Thames is just a part of it. Where next? “The opportunity to discover new areas is there, the money isn’t. It is the saddest thing,” he says.

This is recession talk and it comes in spite of his cleverness at using good restaurants as a catalyst in the property market. “It is all to do with the quality of life. A good meal and a decent bottle of wine should be something that everyone can enjoy. It changes the neighbourhood.”

He never stops thinking about problems that might be solved with a clever application of engineering or design. “If I could bring my version of good taste to the masses then I will rest a happy man,” Sir Terence said years ago. That statement still stands today.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/property/interiorsandshopping/7977334/Sir-Terence-Conran-Modernisms-shining-knight.html