Conran's first professional work came when he worked in the Festival of Britain on the main South Bank site. He left college to take up a job with Dennis Lennon's architectural company, which had been commissioned to make a 1/4-scale interior of a Princess Flying Boat. Conran started his own design practice in 1956 with the Summa furniture range and designing a shop for Mary Quant. In 1964, he opened the first Habitat shop in Chelsea, London, with his third wife Caroline Herbert, which grew into a large chain selling household goods and furniture in contemporary designs. In the mid-1980s, Conran expanded Habitat into the Storehouse plcgroup of companies that included BhS, Mothercare and Heal's but in 1990 he lost control of the company. His later retail companies include the Conran Shop and FSC-certified wood furniture maker Benchmark Furniture, which he co-founded with Sean Sutcliffe in 1983. He has also been involved in architecture and interior design, including establishing the architecture and planning consultancy Conran Roche with Fred Roche in 1980. Projects include Michelin House and the Bluebird Garage, both in Chelsea. Conran had a major role in the regeneration in the early 1990s of the Shad Thames area of London next to Tower Bridge that includes the Design Museum. His business, Conran and Partners, is a design company comprising product, brand and interior designers and architects, working on projects all over the world. Conran designs furniture for Marks & Spencer, J. C. Penney, Content by Conran, Benchmark and The Conran Shop. In 1997 he appeared as himself in “In the Smoke”, S5:E7 of Pie in the Sky.
Restaurants
Besides Bibendum, Conran created many other London restaurants in London and elsewhere. In 2005, he was named as the most influential restaurateur in the UK by CatererSearch, the website of Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine. In 2007, 49 percent of the restaurant business was sold to two former managers, who rebranded it as D&D London. In 2008, he returned to the restaurant business on a personal basis by opening Boundary, a restaurant, bar, café and meeting room complex in Shoreditch, East London. This was followed in 2009 by Lutyens, a restaurant and private club within the former Reuters building in Fleet Street London.
Books
He has written over 50 books that broadly reflect his design philosophy, The majority of these books were published by Conran Octopus, a division of Octopus Publishing Group, a cross-platform illustrated-book publisher founded by Conran and Paul Hamlyn.
Conran married architect Brenda Davison in 1952 at the age of 19; the marriage lasted six months. Conran married his second wife, journalist Shirley Pearce, in 1955 with whom he had two sons - Sebastian and Jasper - before they divorced in 1962. Conran married his third wife, cookery writer Caroline Herbert, the following year. The marriage lasted for 33 years and produced three children - Tom, Sophie and Edmund - before ending in divorce in 1996. His youngest son Edmund, known as Ned, had problems with drug and alcohol abuse and was remanded to custody in a psychiatric unit in 2001 following a sexual assault on a tourist in London. He has since recovered and become a restaurateur.
