The Design Museum in London celebrates Sir Terence Conran ‘s 80th birthday with a big one show celebrating the impact of this designer on contemporary life in Great Britain. Through his own design work Conran transformed the British house. He founded the chain of Habitat furniture stores, for furniture for a modern, simple and welcoming home. The exhibition traces his career from post-war austerity to the birth of the avant-garde and Pop culture of the sixties, to the design boom of the eighties up to the present day.
The exhibition will cover the key themes of Conran’s career exploring his impact on English life and opens with a collection of his objects Conran’s design from the 1940s and 1950s and will include the reconstruction of one of the set shown in Habitat catalogs that were so influential in the 1960s and 1970s.
With the opening of Habitat in 1964, I shattered the old-fashioned retail market by creating a new retail experience that met the needs of pop culture with its cool, modern furniture interior design.
Habitat has introduced a modern aesthetic to Europe, an accessible design, inspired by Bauhaus products.
His desire was to sell good design to the mass market and in the design decade of the 1980s the designer formed the Conran Foundation, an educational institution focused on promoting a better understanding of design whose first effect was to build the first design museum.
