Urban habitat

He opened his first restaurant for £247. His latest cost more than £5m. For most people that would be challenge enough, but not for Sir Terence Conran.

Since graduating from the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1950, he has had one successful career after another - sometimes several at once.

The founder of Habitat and the Conran Design Group, creator of new London landmarks such as Quaglino's, Mezzo and the Gastrodrome, author of nine books and winner of a clutch of awards, he could clearly have retired several times over, but the idea of hitting a ball around a golf course all day horrifies him.

"The great pleasure in my life is doing things," he says. "If I didn't get pleasure from them, I wouldn't do them. Virtually everything I do is related in some way to things I do in business, but that is what gives me pleasure. I am the luckiest man in the world," he muses, gazing out of his glamorous offices overlooking the Thames.

"There is hardly anyone else in the world who I know that has such an extremely good life." He certainly seems very comfortable with it as he puffs on his cigar.

But it wasn't always so. His parents were "typical middle class" people who had lost their money in the Great Crash and had to scrimp and save to send their son to Bryanston School in Dorset, where Sir Terence is now a governor.

"They managed to make ends meet with some difficulty," he recalls, "but they did their very best to educate my sister and me."

He was "dreadfully broke" when he started the Soup Kitchen in 1954. "I was living in a house with a lot of other young people," he recalls with a smile, "wondering what we could do to make some money. And we thought, why not open a café for people like us?"

Typically, he went into it properly, taking himself off to Paris and coming back with a formula that was revolutionary for London in those post-war years. The Soup Kitchen served a variety of soups based on a huge vat of good stock, and French bread and butter - "terribly thrilling at the time".

Even more thrilling, it featured espresso coffee from one of the first Gaggia machines in the country, which Sir Terence bought in Italy. The venture proved successful enough to allow him to open several more branches in London, but he came a cropper in Cambridge.

"It was a disaster," he smiles. "The students would come in and sit all evening over a cup of coffee. I know that turning tables is one of the most important things in the business and I found that out in my very early days."

He sold his next restaurant, the Orrery, in the King's Road, because of his expanding furniture business and the subsequent move into retailing with Habitat in 1964.

Although he designed and ran the Neal Street Restaurant (now owned by his brother-in-law Antonio Carluccio) in the 1970s, it wasn't until 1987 that he opened his own restaurants again - Bibendum (with partners Paul Hamlyn and Simon Hopkinson), followed by the Blue Print Café, at the Design Museum, in 1989.

But the "restaurant bug", as he puts it, really got going again when he retired as chairman of Storehouse in 1990. It was a big challenge for him when Habitat/ Mothercare merged with British Home Stores in 1986, and though he achieved his aim of bringing well-designed products to the mass market, it was a salutary experience.

"One of the things I learnt is how different a merger is from a takeover," he explains. "You had to cajole and persuade people how important change was instead of saying, ‘we do it this way'."

He is not, he agrees, a corporate animal. "I found the politics that went with it very disagreeable. At that time, everyone in the City expected improvements immediately and I like doing things well, not doing something to give an impression of change."

Which gets him on to one of his many hobby horses, the City's predilection for short-term gains rather than long-term investment.

"I am convinced that it is terribly damaging, especially for industry in this country," he says passionately. "I had a major argument with Margaret Thatcher about it. It did seem contrary to many of the things she believed in."

He blames Thatcher, too, for getting rid of the Greater London Council out of political spite and leaving London at the whim of too many vested interests.

"To have a major city with no direction is just a disaster. We need river transport," he declares. "If London Transport had been told to work with the service, or even run it, it would have succeeded."

He believes the Canary Wharf scheme failed because the Corporation of London saw it as a rival and relaxed planning restrictions in the City to enable buildings to go up and rents to come down. "This is not planning for London," says Sir Terence angrily. "It is not good for the city as a whole."

Design for restaurants

Design, too, is essentially about planning, especially on a huge project such as his 750-seat restaurant, Mezzo. "Design is how something works," he says, gesturing emphatically. "It's how goods come in and rubbish goes out. It's the ergonomics of the kitchen, it's systems and services."

He likes restaurants on this scale because they symbolise what he calls a "democratic attitude" to eating. "If you go to some restaurants, you need to be fairly confident about (a) your knowledge of the food, and (b) your behaviour," he explains. "At Quaglino's you can order something from the menu that you may never have had before, whereas in a different sort of restaurant you'd feel self-conscious. It is like a big, jolly party."

For the "eat'n'go" Mezzonine restaurant on Mezzo's ground floor, executive chef John Torode has created a curious menu influenced by Thai street food, but Sir Terence says it works well. "We saw this type of Australasian food as fast and nourishing and of its time," he explains.

What he calls the failure of existing training establishments to keep pace with the "new British cooking" and the expansion of the restaurant business, has led him to establish the Butlers Wharf Chef School next door to the Gastrodrome, in enthusiastic partnership with Southwark Council, the Hotel & Catering Training Company and the London Docklands Development Corporation.

It opened last autumn and Conran Restaurants held its Christmas party there. "It was very, very good!" says Sir Terence with satisfaction. "It puts our professional establishments on their mettle."

He is currently working on a restaurant above the new Conran Shop in Marylebone and another Gastrodrome-style complex, the Bluebird Garage, on the King's Road, which we can safely assume will be as stylish and audacious as its predecessors.

"I love London," he says, gazing out over the 12-acre Butlers Wharf site that he has done so much to transform. "It's a fantastic city."