Terence Conran once suggested stuffing the Victoria and Albert museum's former director, the exquisite Roy Strong, putting him in a glass case, and turning him into an exhibit in his own museum on the grounds that his languid moustache and his weakness for suits with tulip lapels made him a valuable period piece in urgent need of preservation. In fact, Conran himself represents a rather more revealing insight into the shifting tastes of contemporary Britain. And unlike Strong, he has never been content with the role of passive consumer. Conran, now about to celebrate his seventieth birthday, has constantly done everything he could to persuade us all to share his enthusiasms. He went to France as a student and he wanted everyone to enjoy the heavy white crockery, the enamel coffee pots and garlic presses he found there. So he opened a shop to sell them. He got interested in cooking so he opened a restaurant. Conran is no missionary, but making money was never the whole point. He discovered design, very much the way he discovered good food, and he wanted everybody to have it. 'Given the choice between something that is well designed, and something that isn't, I've always assumed that people would choose the former', says Conran. And so the Design Museum eventually followed Habitat.
Conran carefully keeps his own work out of the museum he created, but over the past half century he has done as much as anybody to shape our dreams of the domestic good life and our attitudes to the things we use, and the way we live. The twists and turns of his career are the story of postwar design in Britain. As the country emerged from wartime austerity, the then still stick-thin young Conran was zipping back and forth between his Earl's Court flat and the studio he shared with Eduardo Paolozzi in the East End on his newly acquired Vespa, one of the first imported from Italy. In the 1950s, he officiated over the terminally stylish espresso machine in his first café, the Soup Kitchen, in his striped shirts and three-inch wide braces. He opened the first Habitat off the King's Road just ahead of the Swinging London explosion in the 1960s, by which time he had sprouted sideburns. He defined the middle-class living room in the 1970s with his distinctive blend of cantilevered chrome-plated steel Bauhaus armchairs, modular seating units and whimsical antiques. And in the 1990s, he moved beyond the domestic world to invent the giant restaurant, creating a new version of public life. Conran made restaurants on an industrial scale big enough to function as a species of street theatre, and triggered off a desperate shortage of chefs and waiters in the process. So successful was the Conran approach to restaurants that, for a while, having one suddenly became a must-have status symbol for ambitious provincial cities on the make. Glasgow for one was ready to put public money into persuading Conran to open up there.
Now Conran is publishing an autobiography and exhibiting a collection of his furniture designs, mostly made in the past year, to remind us that he would really like to be seen as a designer more than a businessman. Conran is not in the business of creating objects that beat you over the head; instead he calls his designs 'plain, simple and useful'. They are not aggressively modern, but rely on comfortable, simple materials, especially timber. And many of them are made in the workshop that Conran set up at his country house with two young furniture-makers in 1983. They remind you of the ingenuity of the schoolboy Conran who once made his own potter's wheel and kiln from pieces of an old camshaft. As designs, they are engaging and touchingly English, the product of a magpie eye and feeling for making things.
But what really makes Conran stand out as a designer is the way he has been able to create a way of life that other people want to live too. Conran style works not because people want to be like him, but because he has a knack of creating a way of life that anybody can buy into ; a way of life that includes fresh coffee and holidays in France, going out to unflashy restaurants, and gardening in a stylish manner. It was never about conspicuous consumption; bright new plastic chairs could sit comfortably next to junk-shop finds and the occasional antique. It began as the style of choice of the strapped-for-cash student, the young professional setting up home for the first time, and bit by bit it almost imperceptibly elbowed aside what had gone before to become the signature style of grown-up Britain, a generational shift that had its apotheosis on the night that the Blairs took Bill and Hillary Clinton for dinner at the Pont de La Tour, Conran's Thameside restaurant. And of course it's also taken on some of the aura of a period piece, albeit a period piece that is already the subject of a nostalgic revival.
The Conran look migrated from the newly gentrified inner-city streets to become the ubiquitous uniform of stylishly affluent suburbia. Conran's foam sofas, plastic wastepaper baskets, Art Deco wallpaper, brushed aluminium up-lighters and rush matting helped a generation liberate itself from the bleak memories of their parents' world. Conran showed how the lingering odour of utility furniture, coin-in-the-slot gas fires and bath times limited to three inches of hot water per day could be dispelled with a coat of orange paint, a floor sander and a scattering of ethnic durries. But the Conran style never fossilised. Look at the mid-Seventies living room in his Regent's Park Nash terrace house, and the Dockland loft he lives in now. The living room got pride of place in the House Book, Conran's domestic manifesto that went into 10 editions between 1974 and 1983. The room is painted a careful shade of buttermilk. The floorboards are stripped, of course. In the background, a striking contemporary painting hangs over the original marble fireplace. A fire burns in the grate, fuelled by an outsize wicker log basket. There is a Vico Magistretti chair at the table, while the outsize sofa is flanked by a pair of Mies van der Rohe chairs, and a flock of giant floor cushions covered in striped fabric. A spotlamp sits on the coffee table.
Now Conran lives in Docklands when he's in London. The sofas are tobacco coloured leather, and are deliberately designed to evoke memories of clubland. A large model biplane hangs from the roof light. There are still stripped wooden floors, this time maple. The strong colours and the countrified trimmings have disappeared but there is still a brass telescope. Both are unmistakably of their moment, and equally unmistakably, Conran interiors. And they have done more between them to change the tastebuds of Britain than a decade of Changing Rooms. But it's not just the living room Conran has shaped. Conran's firm has designed hotels and shopping centres, the interiors for Concorde, cutlery and lamps, toys and pushchairs. And running through all of it is a single-minded view of the world. It's not the ruthless consistency of a Mies van der Rohe. It is the world according to Conran, an attempt to make ordinary, banal places a little out of the ordinary. The Habitat catalogues brilliantly encapsulated that world, and made us all feel as if we were putting our noses to the glass to peep in on somebody else's Christmas. Even from the other side of the glass it looks so attainable, not grand, not posh, but comfortable. It's about dreams, of course, France as we would like it to be, not the way it really is, and of family life as it ought to be. But at least Conran predates the irony epidemic. Sitting at a table in Quaglino's, you imagine for a minute that we are stepping into the Deux Magots circa 1934 before the braying of the champagne-swilling brokers at the bar brings us back to earth. But there are no tongue-in-cheek HP sauce bottles, Marco Pierre White-style, on the tables at Pont de La Tour. And that is because Conran believes in his own dream.
What the professionals say...
Alice Rawsthorn, director of the Design Museum In the Sixties and Seventies he did with furniture what people like Mary Quant and Alexander Plunkett Green were doing with avant-garde fashion - he saw how it could be marketed to the masses. If you look at what Habitat were selling, it was seen as high fashion, whereas in the countries it came from, like France and Italy, it was bog-standard. He looked at Scandinavian modernist furniture, lots of wood and flowing lines and softened it for the British taste.
He has always been brilliant at knowing how to take radical ideas and make them acceptable to the mass market. I remember anxiously awaiting the arrival of a long dreamed-of Habitat bean bag which was seen as the height of avant-garde in the Seventies.
Jonathan Meades Terence Conran has come full circle since he started running restaurants in the Fifties. He always thought of them as places where he could propagate his notions about design. His real achievement is to have popularised modernism. What you've got today is a synthetic modernism, looking back at Le Corbusier and Goldfinger and even the brutalists. But it has become acceptable and user-friendly, and this is precisely what Conran has done.
He has taken modernism into the mainstream. He may have diluted it, but he, more than anyone, has changed British taste over the past 40 years. Think what people's houses looked like in the Fifties.
Stephen Bayley, creator of the Boilerhouse Project and The Design Museum for Terence Conran Working close to Terence Conran inevitably stimulates speculation about the nature of genius and the psychopathology of success. I'm certain that the ability to get the very best out of other people is fundamental, but in Terence's case there's something else. Besides (literally) one very good eye, he has a vivid sense of the pleasure to be had from ordinary things done well. With the instincts of an aesthetic libertine controlled by a somewhat puritanical intellect, probably no one else has contributed more to the style and substance of life in Britain over the past 50 years. It's a shame that, like Nigel Mansell and Margaret Thatcher, he has started calling himself 'we', but I think he should be given the clap he so richly deserves.
Q&A: A Sort of Autobiography by Terence Conran (HarperCollins £19.99) will be published on 1 October. Pure, Simple & Useful, an exhibition of Terence Conran's drawings and Conran products, runs from 26 September to 19 October at The Conran Shop, Fulham Road, London SW3
