Terence Conran built a £200 million empire and then watched most of it disappear. Now he’s redesigning and – he hopes – rebuilding his dreams.

SIR TERENCE Conran screws up his face, goes red, whacks the table and his coffee spoon flies up in the air. He grimaces. His wife has said he has the most tremendous temper. ‘I’ve lost complete control only half a dozen times in my life. Then I get into extreme fury and out of control. I hope it’ll never happen again in my life. It feels rather like being sick, physically draining,’ he says.

‘I lose my temper with Shirley (his former Superwoman wife). She’s somebody who just goes on and on and on and will not let the subject die.’ On other occasions, like today, he’ll thump the table and people think he’s losing his temper. ‘But actually it’s just me marking an exclamation mark.’ A boat goes by outside the window and Sir Terence lights a cigar. Next February Sir Terence will open London’s largest restaurant, Quaglino’s, in Bury Street, St James’s. Founded in 1911, it was London’s most fashionable restaurant in the Thirties and has been closed since 1980. Sir Terence is sitting in his Butlers Wharf office, overlooking Tower Bridge, with Conran furniture, modern art and freshly ground coffee. The cultural hero is wearing a navy linen suit, college shoes, red polka dot tie and gruff expression. He looks very attractive.

He opened his first Habitat shop in 1964, improved the public’s taste, helped bring the word ‘design’ into the dictionary and made a great deal of money. But he met Nemesis in 1987 when he faltered in the City and decided he wanted out of Storehouse (BhS, Habitat, Mothercare and Richard Shops). Less than five years ago, he was ‘worth £200 million on paper’. And now? ‘What I am worth is my own business.’ The expression in his eyes is lifeless. ‘The turnover of my various businesses now comes to around £35 million. Peanuts compared to the old days, but reasonably substantial . . Well, Butlers Wharf has gone into receivership. And he left Storehouse in May 1990 (a year before he was due to retire) with a seven per cent stake. Once worth more than £100 million, that stake, which he later sold, was then worth less than £30 million.

‘I don’t feel like yesterday’s man. I happen to be running probably London’s currently most successful store (The Conran Shop) and certainly three of London’s most successful restaurants (Bibendum, Le Pont de la Tour and Blueprint Cafe).’

The restaurants appear to be flourishing. But he bought the Conran Shop UK in May 1990 for £3.5 million; a year in which the shop made pre-tax profits of £506,000. Observers question whether it is now likely to see similar returns.

Sir Terence is opening another Conran Shop in Paris. In London a smoked fish shop and ‘yet another’ restaurant, Cantina, are scheduled to open in November. And then there’s Quaglino’s.

‘Quaglino’s is to be the biggest brasserie in London. It will seat 400 people. There’s going to be lots of art in it. I’ve asked contemporary art dealer Kasmin to use some of the walls as a gallery now that his Cork Street gallery has closed.’

Conran also has a furniture business, Benchmark Woodworking Ltd, is chairman of the Design Museum and is writing a couple of books for his publishing house Conran Octopus. ‘One book is rather appropriately called Back to Basics.’

Yet he has a slight air of disillusionment, a languorous feel to him. He also has a bit of a lisp and a somewhat depressed manner of speaking, as if he can’t muster the enthusiasm. But he has a wry humour, though he doesn’t go out of his way to charm. Perhaps this is defensiveness.

He studied at Central School of Art and Design and married three times – first to Brenda Davidson, then to art school graduate Shirley Pearce by whom he has two sons, Sebastian and Jasper; and now to food writer Caroline, by whom he has three more children, Tom, Sophie and Ned. ‘He has been married to Caroline for 27 years. ‘We pursue relatively independent lives’ – a fact which friends emphasise – ‘but we do get on extremely well.’ He is proud of his children. ‘I don’t think I was a model father, I’m not a family man or conventional father. But I think I was more than adequate. Shirley and I were divorced in fairly difficult circumstances, after six years of marriage – some happy, the rest deeply unhappy. I think I was discarded (he laughs) because I didn’t fit into her plans. I think she probably regretted it in later years!

‘Shirley is an extremely ambitious woman and it’s difficult to live with someone intensely ambitious. She was rushing round the world and Caroline took on the mothering role. Caroline and I were probably a haven of sanity for Jasper and Sebastian. Caroline probably compensated on the emotional side for my simplicity in that area.’

His son, fashion designer Jasper, is homosexual. Sir Terence has said that that is Jasper’s choice, though he thinks it harder to find happiness as a homosexual. ‘I don’t blame myself at all. That would be like an Indian family being upset because they’d got a girl instead of a son.’ He lights his cigar again. Extracting personal information from him is, initially, like trying to persuade him to furnish his homes with Louis XVI and ruched curtains.

‘When Jasper was only three some gay friends of mine told me, ‘Japser is going to be gay.’ They knew. Many of my friends are gay and one’s son being gay isn’t any different. I don’t think it has anything to do with upbringing – I’ve certainly never had any homosexual tendencies myself. I think people are born that way. Not for one moment have I ever been worried, sad or embarrassed that Jasper is gay.’

We talk then about Sir Terence’s childhood. His parents, both from ‘extremely wealthy’ families who had lost their money in the 1929 crash, had to scrimp to send him to school. ‘We were pretty broke. But I didn’t feel deprived. I’d never known any different. It was the war years and life was very austere.’

He was expelled from Bryanston, aged 16. ‘I was caught riding a bicycle without lights in the direction of Tarrant Rushton aerodrome at midnight. I was having a midnight tryst with my girlfriend.’

They lived in London then Liphook. ‘A perfectly pleasant upbringing.’ His father imported resin for paint. ‘He got rather fed up that things went badly for him.’ The young Terence was industrious: he collected wild flowers, was a lepidopterist and had a workshop and pottery at home. He was also like his mother, ‘emotionally controlled with a great creative talent and wonderful eye’. From this came the self-professedly self-confident, loyal and intolerant Sir Terence.

The adult Sir Terence has worked hard. He has even been called a workaholic. ‘I don’t think I am.’ Nowadays he gets up at 5.30am and goes to bed at midnight. In between he leads an ‘intensely unhealthy life, smoking cigars, eating too much and drinking good wine’. He ‘relaxes’ in the bath. ‘I lie in the bath and think about how the towel dispenser is going to fit into the wash basin at Quaglino’s.’

He is ‘sad’ about his Storehouse experience. ‘Though at one stage I was doing more work than was good for me. I felt physically and mentally exhausted. I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got all these carrier bags of reports to do and meetings shunting up against each other.’ But I miss the mass-market element. My greatest regret is that I’ll never finish that job (of revitalising the companies). That rankles.’ He’s also sad he wasn’t able to finish Butlers Wharf in the way he dreamed.

He has never done anything ‘purely to make money’. For him, work is pleasurable. He was impoverished when he started off and has said he doesn’t want to die rich. ‘It would be silly and offensive to say one’s not interested in money though,’ says this man who believes in the principles of socialism and has never voted Tory. ‘I’ve spent my money on houses and doing them up and on pictures and sculpture. But I’ve never dreamed of owning Irises or anything. I don’t like external manifestations of wealth in any way.’

And is it true that he’s mean? ‘Ah, my meanness! I don’t like waste. I try to tell everyone how much photocopies cost and I encourage them to switch the lights out. I don’t like them to throw away anything that can be used. People confuse that with meanness.’

Sir Terence softens as the interview proceeds, smiling more, laughing often and taking the mickey. I warmed to him. But he guards his emotions more than most. ‘He doesn’t ever show his emotions or speak about them,’ Jasper once said of his father.

‘I think,’ says Sir Terence slowly, ‘emotions are very private things. I don’t express them to other people. They are just for me. I like being under control.’ He doesn’t respond well to probing questions and keeps moving his chair farther away.

He is also a surprisingly shy man. ‘I am very self-contained. I’m not shy with people I know well. But I hate going to parties. I loathe meeting new people. I really don’t know what to talk to them about. I get embarrassed.’ He is now 60 – an age when many multi-millionaires would be thinking of retiring. Would he like to wind down his work to spend more time, say, with his wife?

‘No. I’ll never retire. I’ll never stop doing things. I hope to have projects on the go until I die.’ It has been said by a friend of his that Sir Terence is deeply afraid of growing old and dying. Typically he demurs. ‘Actually, I’m quite relaxed about the idea that death is an inevitability.’

Is death The End? Is there an afterlife? How does he view dying? He shakes his head and motions with his expressive hands, does a kind of whistle, says chuuu, and does a ‘curtains’ gesture followed by a sort of Nazi salute. This indicates that ‘my body is going to be taken away and cut up for scientific research. Then there’ll be a huge fireworks display and a wonderful dinner for my friends when I hope they’ll get very merry’. So he’s not reckoning on coming back again? ‘One would be rather surprised.’ When would he like to die? ‘I hate the idea of being senile. I’d like to die at 75, no older than that. Then I think, ‘Oh my God, I’ve only got another 15 years to do all these things I want to do.’ ‘