Retirement blog about the passing of a hero

I can’t let the death of Terence Conran pass without a comment. Maybe not actually a ‘hero’ but pretty damn close. As The Guardian writer, Suzanne Moore put it, ‘we all have a little bit of Conran in our lives whether we think about design or not’. In our case more than a ‘little bit’.  She went on, ‘Conran understood you could give people what they didn’t know they wanted until they saw it.’ How true, witness the things we now own that we probably hadn’t planned on buying until we saw it in the shop. That shop being Habitat.

With that thought in mind I decided the best way of noting his significance to us and arguably the rest of Britain was to take a look at the pieces of furniture and other objects we have bought from Habitat and, more to the point, still have and are in constant use. Starting with their catalogue from 1977 in the image above, ( we have others but this one was quickly found).

I suppose this retirement blog is another of those ‘looking back with fond recollections’ because I remember back in the sixties, I guess, when a Habitat opened in Nottingham which was at that time pretty much our home city. This may have been the first Habitat outside of London where we had shopped until then. No trip to the capital would be complete without a shopping trip to Habitat. I must admit that a rattan sofa from those days has not survived but most things have stood the test of time.

We eventually made our home in Leeds where we remain 50 years later. The nearest shop then was in York and somewhere I’ve still got a photo of me taken in the shop sitting on a Habitat sofa and looking pretty damn cool, though I say so myself. As was everything the shop sold. I can’t begin to tell you how cool it was to have bright, green sheets (there were dark brown and bright yellow as well). Britain had never seen the like.

As the years wore on people seemed to stop shopping at Habitat, other shops (namely IKEA, where I have to admit we often buy stuff these days but that’s partly because it’s there and Habitat isn’t) encroaching on the same demographic. Terence Conran moved on to his up-market, Conran shop and out of our price bracket but we will be forever grateful for the fun / style he brought into our lives in our younger days and on into middle age and even middle classness.

So, given the idea for this blog, it wasn’t very hard to look around our house and find timeless example of what we bought and have kept all these years. And a very broad spectrum it is too. From chicken brick (see below) to chesterfield, from desk to dressing gown (not shown), they’re all still with us. These items have moved with us from our youth to our retirement years. And, like old friends, we are jolly glad to have them still with us.

They remain part of our lives and a large part of the reason we are comfortable in our retirement. Long may the comfort continue.

What follows is a selection of Habitat items. We’ve got more but these were the ones we could easily lay our hands on. Enjoy.