Designs On The World

The Sunday Age

Sunday February 8, 1998

Peter Wilmoth

A HUGE cigar the width of a fist lies half-smoked in a white marble ashtray in Sir Terence Conran's office. It may not be fired up, but its pungent aroma is not easily dissipated. It is the smell of power, wealth and a flouting of a no-smoking culture elsewhere in the building.

When you're as rich and influential as Sir Terence, when you're "the grand co-ordinator of British lifestyle", when you feed 70,000 Londoners a week, when you're worth $180 million and when Tony Blair asks if he can bring Bill Clinton over for lunch, the stogie gets lit up pretty much wherever and whenever you want.

Even with non-smoking prime ministers and presidents. "Tony Blair phoned up and said, 'Look, I've just seen the weather forecast, it's going to be a lovely day, how nice it would be to take the Clintons to an ordinary restaurant. Do you think you could find a table for us at Le Pont de la Tour?' I said, 'I'm sorry, we're fully booked'."

The 66-year-old Sir Terence unleashes a howl of laughter. "We also had to find space for about 1000 security people. I found one turning over the napkins. I said, 'What about those 3000 unopened bottles over there, are you going to pull all the corks out?' "

The lunch at his Le Pont de la Tour on the Thames, of course, went famously well, capping off his apotheosis as a symbol of New Britain under Labor, and reinforcing his image as a political chameleon (he was knighted in 1983 under the Conservatives).

The confluence of the eternally stylish design guru turning on lunch for the young Prime Minister trying to create a court of groovy movers and shakers was a public relations triumph for both sides. But before he became mine host to the world's powerful, he had to become powerful himself, which he did by bringing a style for life (he hates the word "lifestyle") into dowdy post-war Britain. He wanted to bring function and affordability together, and to knock design off its pompous and expensive pedestal.

In his 20s, he was one of the princes of the original Swinging London. The "slim, pallid, poker-faced tycoon" of 25 (according to a magazine and quoted in Nicholas Ind's biography) saw himself at the cutting edge of style, opening his first restaurants and homeware shops.

His friend Mary Quant, who had a shop on the Kings Road, Chelsea, said of young Terence: "There's an enormous sense of appetite about the man in every way."

His appetite for expansion and his lust for the next project still fuels the Conran empire. Never happier than when starting on a new project, he has spent the past three decades colonising the London restaurant scene, with 10 major establishments, including the massive 300-seat Quaglino's in St James's, the 700-seater Mezzo in Soho, and the one-stop food experience, the 240-seat Bluebird on the Kings Road in Chelsea.

With his homeware and design empire - The Conran Shop and Habitat - Sir Terence has kitted out the homes of many thousands of white-collar London professionals who have gone in and bought "good taste" by the basketful.

And now, it's Melbourne's turn. Sir Terence arrives in town next week for the opening of The Conran Shop in the old Georges building in Collins Street as a franchise business operated by Georges and in collaboration with Stephen Bennett, the founder of Country Road.

Conran has also overseen three new restaurants in the complex: a 248-seater called The Brasserie, a more intimate 115-seat noodle bar called The Canteen and a 100-seat cafe called The Cafe. Sir Terence can hardly wait to get on the plane.

"Going to Georges will be absolutely thrilling," he says.

For a man credited with having "educated the ordinary English eye" ('Daily Telegraph'), his office is surprisingly modest. A huge tree grows in a pot in the corner, an upside-down lamp illuminates one wall and on his large wooden desk sits a container with a messy array of green textas.

Sir Terence, famously ill-tempered and deliberately provocative to his staff, was once called "the Andrew Lloyd Webber of kitchenware and scatter cushions".

"Ferocious comment," he laughs when reminded. "I wonder if Andrew Lloyd Webber would like to be called the Terence Conran of musicals. Give me another one. Another nasty one."

Well, let's see. Former colleague at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Sir Roy Strong tried to settle an old score by calling him a "megalomaniac" in a book review. He was also called "a mediaeval despot".

"If you do have strong ideas and are very determined, you can be seen to be despotic," he says. "I very much hope I'm not. I don't see it in myself."

It's a view not always shared by colleagues at Conran, according to Nicholas Ind's biography. Sometimes Conran people have wanted to tell Sir Terence where to shove his French pepper grinders.

"I use my temper to stir the blood of my designers," Sir Terence once said, according to Ind. "I like the idea of people thinking I am idiosyncratic so they can gossip about me behind my back. I hate the dull pattern of sanity."

Now, he says, even though he has clearly mellowed and that the rages have subsided, he agrees that's a fair picture. "I don't want my life to be like that" - (traces a straight line through the air) - "I want peaks and troughs and I've certainly had those'.

"I have had the most enjoyable life. My work is 95 per cent a pleasure to me. I started off when I was young, extremely frustrated that I wasn't able to make things happen, but from the age of 35 I've been able to achieve practically all I wanted."

He's enormously rich, but wealth hasn't robbed him of ambition or drive. His friends and biographer says he's not interested in the money, and it at least appears true. "I've never been in the business for the purpose of making money. The most important thing for me was doing things, and if you do them with enough passion there's a very great likelihood that you'll make money out of them.

"Anyway," he shrugs, "what a bore, you die with a lot of money."

The goings-on of the Conran clan has made for thrilling reading for the British middle and upper classes. His second wife Shirley (he was married to his first wife, Brenda Davison, for just five months) was integral to his early ventures and went on to become a writer of airport novels like 'Lace'.

His third marriage, to Caroline, lasted 30 years, ending acrimoniously last year. In July, a judge granted Caroline a record $24 million divorce settlement. Sir Terence said the award was unbelievable, saying "just because she cooked a few meals now and again and wrote a few books. I taught her how to cook".

"Now there you are," he says, annoyed for the first time. Maybe 'The Age' wouldn't be selective in the same way as they might in London. What I actually said was . . . I'd given Caroline 26 per cent of the company when we got married, so she had every reason to make a good contribution.

"In fact, she made a great deal in her affidavits about the fact that she had cooked these meals for Habitat directors. What I actually said was she cooked a few meals for Habitat directors, not a few meals generally. Obviously a completely different meaning."

And the judgment? "I felt the judge delivered an extremely unfair and emotional verdict. It was a very sad situation. I didn't think the thing should ever have come to court."

His son Jasper became a well-known fashion designer, who has spoken of growing up as "the son of God". When Jasper decided to stay in New York and study design instead of coming home and becoming a restaurateur, Jasper said his father's reaction was one of "cold fury". "He hadn't been asked because I was too frightened of him," Jasper said in Ind's book. "He was a very powerful figure."

Biographer Ind (Sir Terence authorised it but later deeply regretted the project) paints him as a determined, abrasive, impatient, sometimes bullying man who "loves women but can be misogynistic . . . supremely ambitious and egotistical and yet little concerned with money, generous and parsimonious".

SIR Terence, who has five grandchildren from his five children, appears to have reached a point of feeling a need for redemption for his past behavior, and his indifference at watching his children grow up. In the lifestyle world of Conran, the style was fine. It was the "life" bit that needed some work.

"If you are as involved in business in the way that I am, there isn't the time to do the conventional fathering job. Also, you must remember that most of my children are in their 30s. Thirty years ago there wasn't the same sort of attitude to fatherhood as there is now."

Anyway, it's onwards and upwards. A style guru can't afford to stand still. So let's talk about a cheerier topic, say Australia, from where Sir Terence has been drawing chefs to populate his London restaurants.

"I've been going to Australia quite a lot because my books sell very well there," he says. "I go over for signings. I did one in Sydney and I have never seen such a huge crowd. I thought they'd never stop. I felt it showed that the sort of thing we represent over here was well-recognised and admired by the thinking Australian public."

The thinking Australian public, eh. Well, perhaps he thinks flattery will get him everywhere. Perhaps, given his London track record, it just might.