Should I have heard of him? His name will be familiar if you're British, but the style and food guru is expanding his design empire beyond Britain to New York, Tokyo, Paris and Stockholm.
What does he do? What doesn't he do? Conran owns a number of trendy restaurants and bars (12 in London). He changed the face of British home furnishings forever with the opening
of Habitat in London in 1964, which was embraced by 'swinging Sixties' Londoners. Beatles John Lennon and George Harrison bought furniture there and Mary Quant designed the staff outfits. He opened his first Conran shop in London in 1973, offering the creme de la creme of design.
How did he start? Conran graduated from London's Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1950 and set up a furniture-making business two years later. He founded the Conran Design Group (CDG) in 1956, which rapidly became one of the largest design consultancies in Europe, handling projects for clients such as Sony, Ford Motors, Levi Strauss, Rank Xerox, Gillette and Intercontinental Hotels. Conran also became chairman of Conran Roche, an architectural practice and town-planning company founded in 1980, which designed many high-profile buildings in Britain and Europe, and was responsible for the redevelopment of the unique Michelin Building on Fulham Road in London (which won several architecture and design awards). Conran sold CDG in 1990 and formed a new design consultancy in 1993, known today as Conran & Partners. Its work includes projects for international clients such as Villeroy & Boch (below, Areo bathroom collection), Art Hills Club in Tokyo, Myhotel in London, the huge Ocean Terminal in Edinburgh and the Park hotel in Bangalore, India.
That's enough work for one lifetime. Not if you're Conran. In 1981 he set up the Conran Foundation, a charitable fund dedicated to educating the public and members of British industry about the values of industrial design. One beneficiary is London's Design Museum, which has a permanent collection and a review section displaying new products and prototypes. That's aside from Benchmark, the furniture-making company he set up in 1985 and the publishing arm of his company Conran Octopus, which publishes a range of lifestyle books. Somehow he's also managed to fit in having five children (one of whom, Jasper Conran, is an acclaimed fashion designer).
What is he doing now? He has developed a diffusion furniture range, Content by Conran, which critics have described as the most important development in the British furniture market for more than 30 years.