Terence Conran, a London designer and retailing magnate who eased the gloom of postwar British austerity with stylish home furnishings affordable on a teacher’s salary, and then suffered financial reverses before reinventing himself as an international restaurateur and doyen of modern design, died on Saturday at his country home in Berkshire, England. He was 88.
His family confirmed the death in a statement, without specifying the cause.
Blind in one eye since childhood, Mr. Conran was an entrepreneur of mercurial moods and missionary zeal who created an empire to market his designs, stores known in Europe as Habitat and in America as Conran Shops. After his business declined, he opened restaurants in London, Paris and New York — notably Guastavino’s, a dining cathedral under the tiled terra-cotta arches of the Queensboro Bridge in Manhattan.
He wrote scores of books on design, cooking and other subjects; turned a London warehouse riverfront into a fashionable South Bank commercial development; founded the Design Museum, Britain’s only museum for contemporary products and architectural designs; and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He also married four times, had five children and collected wildflowers, butterflies, old master paintings and Bugatti pedal cars.
Detractors called him a cynical self-promoter who sold simplistic ideas to the masses, like “democratized luxury,” and struck it rich with a sure thing: the inevitable desire of Britons to climb from grinding wartime privations into a consumer class that could afford to replace the threadbare old sofa with something seen as “modern” and in “good taste.”
But admirers said he tried, with remarkable success, to revolutionize the sensibilities of a rising British middle class, offering not just better food but an idea of what a sunlit breakfast on Sunday should be; not just mod touches for the drab suburban semidetached but a taste of la dolce vita: Scandinavian furniture, Italian lighting, French cookware, Bauhaus-style modular shelving and splashes of Pop Art on the walls.
In a career that spanned six decades, he had only one actual job: At 19, he worked briefly for an architect who helped design the 1951 Festival of Britain, a national exposition intended to give Britons a sense of recovery from the war. It also gave him a frank look at a people weary of shortages, and a glimpse of the future of commercial design.
“They came along in their dreary wartime mackintoshes, gas-mask cases filled with Spam sandwiches, and found bright cafes, music, flowers, modern furniture and a spirit of something that none of them had ever experienced in their lives,” Mr. Conran told The Daily Telegraph, the British newspaper, in 2011.