With typical ego, Terence Conran once claimed he had “undoubtedly changed the sex life of Europe” simply by his promotion of the duvet. In 1964 when he opened the doors to his first Habitat store he altered forever the look of the drab postwar British household. Stacked high with novelty items from flat-pack furniture to floral teapots, colourful pepper grinders, sets of knives, gleaming white plates and the “chicken brick”, it gave affordable design and modern living to the aspiring masses for the first time. “It is hard to overstate how uninteresting London was then,” Conran later recalled. “It really was the era of Spam fritters.” He described: “You could go along a terrace of houses, and every living room you looked in was the

Source: The Times September 12, 2020 12:25 UTC