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Lady Conran on auctioning Sir Terence’s design treasure trove

KATE BUSSMANN

He was a giant of British design, founding Habitat, the Design death in 2020, Sir Terence Conran also left behind a huge of the auction, his widow Lady Victoria Conran remembers nothing of buying a fleet of miniature Bugattis for display

Museum and a string of high-profile restaurants. After his collection of furniture and art – now up for sale. On the eve life with a ‘hilarious, adventurous’ man who would think in the hallway, and explains why it’s now time to let it all go

It’s just over two years since Sir Terence Conran died, leaving behind his widow, Victoria, five children, 13 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren – not to mention a design legacy that is impossible to sum up without superlatives. But Lady Conran – Vicki to her friends – hasn’t stopped counting. They were together 29 years, she tells me with redrimmed eyes; a number that includes the time elapsed since he died.

Even so, it is, she concedes, ‘the end of an era’: this summer saw the sale of his beloved Barton Court, the 27-room, 18th-century Berkshire manor house Sir Terence bought as a wreck in 1971 and painstakingly restored with his then wife Caroline, turning it into the country house of his dreams. More recently, it had become his and Victoria’s main home, where they lived during the first lockdown, and where he died.

This month, much of its contents will be auctioned by Bonhams: including pieces he designed for his empire of restaurants and stores and his bespoke furniture design studio, Benchmark, which is based in the grounds of Barton Court. Added to that is his vast collection of antiques and folk art, seminal modern design pieces, household ephemera, an enormous library and an awful lot of wine.

To the end, Sir Terence had believed that Barton Court could be made economically self-sustaining: its vast kitchen gardens, for instance, supplied produce to restaurants including Bibendum, which he opened in 1987 on the site of the old Michelin headquarters in Chelsea. So when news broke in July that the property had been sold, reports suggested that he would have been devastated, and that family members were in the dark, with his executors insisting on the sale. The truth is more prosaic.

‘It was a very large house – far too big even for two of us, but particularly for one person,’ says Lady Conran, simply. ‘Terence’s executors and I discussed it, and they decided to sell the house. None of the children wanted it; they all have their own houses now. I think they never considered that any of them would have it. And they understood fully that it was a pretty unsustainable house for one person to live in.’ As to where the proceeds of the auction will go, she simply says that she won’t be keeping it all.

Barton Court sold quickly and the new buyers wanted in just as fast, so she had just eight weeks to pack up, including the 20 days it took the team from Bonhams to catalogue and store the thousands of items selected for auction. His children, too, selected things they wanted to keep. It was a mammoth task, practically and emotionally. ‘Terence had lived there for 50 years, and he was a terrible hoarder – and I am too,’ she says. ‘He was an eclectic collector: catholic, in the lower case sense of the word. It sounds simplistic, but if he saw something he liked, he liked it. He was very decisive.’

Her eldest stepson, Sebastian, took on the role of archivist: ‘All the photographs and paperwork I didn’t know what to do with, he’d say, “I’ll take it.” He was brilliant. He made my life so much easier, that I could depend on him for that.’ Much of that archive will go to the Design Museum, which Sir Terence co-founded in 1989.

For herself, Lady Conran has mainly kept pictures, cooking equipment, china: ‘practical things, mostly’. She wishes she had room for an enormous 1745 John Rocque map of London, which hung on their bedroom wall (estimate £3,000-5,000). There are also boxes of books in storage waiting for bookcases to be built at her home in Lyme Regis, and the relatively modest London flat she shared with her husband, where we meet today. Overlooking the Thames in a building designed by Richard Rogers, it’s both airy and cosy, with floor-to-ceiling windows, its primarily pale-blue palette a deliberate echo of the watery view beyond.

Like Barton Court, it is filled with design classics and eclectic art and antiques, as well as furniture he designed himself: a huge, comfy Conran Shop sofa, the bespoke plywood cubed shelving. It is also temporarily home to several lots that will be in the auction: an immaculate white leather and walnut Eames lounge chair with matching footstool (£800-1,200), an ebonised oak and steel table he designed for the Concorde room at JFK airport (£200-300), and a collection of furniture maquettes made from his drawings – miniature prototypes of chairs, tables and a shelving unit, made from oak and steel wire (set of six, £1,000-1,500).

‘Terence was a very prolific designer,’ says Lady Conran. ‘He spent a lot of time with 2B pencils and a layout pad –

he would spend all weekend drawing, drawing, drawing, designing chairs, designing tables. On Monday, a design assistant would come and take it away, put it on to CAD [design software], and build a maquette. Then they’d look at it and say, these legs are a bit too thin, or those joints need to be run the other way. And then they would get made into pieces of furniture.’

There are a further 19 sets of maquettes in the auction, and some of the full-sized pieces they went on to become, like his enormous desk with its extending sides (£3,000-5,000). The prototypes that never went into production include his ‘Box’ birch plywood occasional table, its plain lines based on an open cardboard box, which he described as ‘the best thing I’ve ever designed’ (£300-500); The Conran Shop’s other directors didn’t agree.

‘I’ve been lucky enough to do a lot of single-owner sales in the past, from Michael Caine and Jackie Collins to Lauren Bacall, but this has been an unbelievably fascinating experience. He was a doyen of modern British design,’ says Harvey Cammell, global director of valuations at Bonhams. Part of what has made it so interesting to him is the breadth. ‘Even until the mid-1990s people of his generation were probably just collecting antiques, but weren’t mixing things up like he was. It’s a very informed collection, an eclectic mix of witty, fun things.’ There are, for instance, 18 replica Bugattis big enough for a child to drive, some electric but mostly pedal, sold in individual lots (estimated starting prices are from £500 to £6,000). ‘They were collected by a Frenchman he’d got to know. When this chap had to downsize, Terence offered to buy the whole lot, and had them mounted along a long corridor. Even Lady Conran couldn’t believe it.’

When I arrive for our interview, she lets me in, statuesque and elegant in pearls gifted to her by Sir Terence and her mother, and a wrap dress chosen for her by her second stepson, Jasper. (‘Beautiful, isn’t it? I have one in stripes, too,’ she says with step-motherly pride, scrunching it up to show how well it packs.) Now 67, plummily English with no hint of her Irish roots, she initially seems fragile and nervous, and ushers me straight into the kitchen where an entirely unexpected lunch of sushi and miso is waiting on a beautifully set Saarinen Tulip table, paper takeaway boxes juxtaposed with delicate glassware, white china and crisp linen napkins. She seems to relax playing host, telling not-for-publication stories, swearing liberally and laughing loudly.

It’s hard to overstate Sir Terence’s influence on postwar Britain, although some argue that he didn’t so much come up with the ideas as have a magpie’s eye, and a passion for the democratisation of good design. No venture epitomised this more than Habitat: launched in 1964, it brought visual joy and his bon viveur spirit to a country that was starved of both. In its stores, you’d find French cookware, Polish enamel coffee pots, Japanese paper lampshades and Scandinavian duvets

‘He was an eclectic collector. It sounds simplistic, butifhesaw something he liked, he liked it. He was very decisive’

(with instructions on how to use them).

His aesthetic was both utilitarian and whimsical, and my own childhood home, which my parents bought in 1969, could have been designed by him: a modernised Victorian semi, it had whitewashed walls, a knocked-through kitchen-living room, stripped floorboards and quarry tiles, tongue-andgroove cupboards and that red enamel coffee pot. A serial entrepreneur, in 1973 he opened The Conran Shop, acquiring Mothercare in 1982, then Heal’s in 1983.

His was a retail empire that at its peak had a workforce of 33,000 and a £1.5 billion turnover, before it imploded, with many parts sold off.

Sir Terence’s personal life could be just as headspinning. His first marriage, at 19, to an architect eight years his senior, ended within a year. His second, to Shirley (author of Superwoman), with whom he had Sebastian and Jasper, ended in 1962 amidst accusations of his infidelity. That was the grounds on which his third wife, Caroline, divorced him; they had three children, Tom, Sophie and Ned (she left him on their 30th wedding anniversary in 1993, after he forgot that or her birthday, depending on which account you read. Some of his children have been scathing about his skills as a father: ‘In my family, you don’t sink, you drown,’ Jasper has reportedly said).

He was also a foodie, a passion awoken on a 1953 trip to France; his mentor, the artist Eduardo Paolozzi, taught him how to chop an onion. From a humble bistro to Bibendum and Pont

de la Tour, he opened dozens of restaurants – and shuttered many. In his final years, he was still making deals, some of them ill-fated. He was, says Lady Conran, never satisfied. ‘He never gave up. There was always the next thing. Even during the first lockdown he would say, “I have to go to meetings.” I’d say, “Nobody’s having meetings, they’re doing them on Zoom.” “No, no, no,” he’d say, “I have to go! I can go to meetings.”’ She laughs. In her deep-voiced impression, he is gruff, incensed. ‘He absolutely hated being cut off from people. And Zoom was a step too far – he was a bit of a Luddite. He didn’t do email, didn’t even have a mobile. And,’ she starts laughing again, ‘one of his great friends was [iphone designer] Jony Ive. Jony would send us all the latest things, and Terence would be like, “Urgh! Give it to your son, give it to the gardener.”’ She mimes him dangling a phone from its corner in disgust, and flinging it away.

She is relentlessly self-deprecating and very funny; after our lunch we move to ‘sit soft’ in the living room, but it is almost painful drawing details from her about her own career, so riven are they with dismissive asides. She has been described in the press as an interior designer, but asked if that is the best way to sum up her expertise, she cringes. ‘I’m Jack, not expert.’

Perhaps it stems from her father’s Quaker upbringing, or her haphazard education, including a period at a hated boarding school and a couple of years in rural Tipperary, where she and her brother ‘went to the bank manager’s wife for maths and history, and the archdeacon for French and Latin’.

She skipped university, working in graphic design, then magazines, then advertising, acquiring a husband and three children along the way. In late 1993, she was divorced and living with her children in the south of France, where she was project managing a renovation for a rock star, when she found herself in a hotel bar talking to Sir Terence Conran, then in his early 60s.

They ditched their mutual acquaintance, and ended up in a nightclub. ‘And that,’ she says, a-flutter at the memory, ‘was it. He said, “Will you come to London at the weekend?” I went, “I’ll have to bring my kids.”’ She mimes his surprise, and then a shrug. ‘He said, “I’m too old to do a relationship over 800 miles. So you’ll have to come back and live here.”’ It was two days before they were a couple, and he was an instant stepfather to her children, an ‘utterly brilliant one, hands-on, absolutely fantastic’. She went to work for him at his architectural practice, Conran and Partners. From that day on, she says, ‘I can’t think we spent any time apart. We did everything together.’ They married in secret at Chelsea Register Office in 2000 (‘otherwise we thought we’d just never get it done’).

By reputation, Sir Terence could be difficult; even in his own description, he was ‘ambitious, mean, kind, greedy, frustrated, emotional, tiresome, intolerant, shy, fat’. But to Lady Conran, he was adventurous and hilarious. They would drive to Paris or Milan on a whim, scour brocantes near their former home in the south of France, and host boozy parties in Berkshire, which regularly ended with pyrotechnics.

He would leave an estate estimated at £44 million, and in an interview with Vanity Fair three years prior to his death Sir Terence mentioned that he had left money in his will ‘so that my ashes will be left in rockets for a party to celebrate my demise. I like the idea of being flung into the sky.’ He died on 12 September 2020, not from Covid. ‘I just think he’d had enough,’ Lady Conran says. ‘He’d ended up in hospital on many occasions, and they’d say, “You need to prepare yourself ”, but then he’d be home drinking whisky. And then this time… it really was a shock.’

Restrictions at the time limited funeral guests to 30, and she believes it helped her: ‘You’re not overwhelmed, you can kind of let go a bit.’ Today, she insists, ‘I’m fine. I’m OK. Life goes on. I’ve got some grandchildren, and lots of Terence’s grandchildren. It’s lovely.’ She gets on well with his children. ‘They’re absolutely adorable. I live close to Jasper and see quite a lot of him, and as I say, Sebastian was utterly brilliant. Sophie and I get on very well, and her children are divine. Tom always seems to be travelling a lot, but I saw him in the summer, and Ned I haven’t seen for a bit, I think he’s gone to live in Costa Rica.’

As Sir Terence was a Companion of Honour, they were permitted to have his funeral at the Chapel Royal in Hampton Court Palace, ‘and they allowed a choir to sing. So it was really very beautiful.’ And then, exactly a year after his death, she was finally able to throw the kind of party he had wanted, erecting a marquee in the grounds of Barton Court and hosting a lunch ‘for his old mates, the people he loved, with lots of very good wine from the cellar, and lots of Champagne. The speeches went on for about five hours,’ she laughs. And Sir Terence got his wish, his ashes packed into ‘great big rockets’, and fired into the air over the house he adored to the very end. ‘He’d have loved it,’ she says with a smile.

Sir Terence Conran – The Contents of Barton Court on Wednesday 14 December at 10am; bonhams.com

‘He hated being cut off from people. Andzoomwasa step too far – he was a bit of a Luddite. He didn’t even have a mobile phone’

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