Sir Terence Conran, the British designer, restaurateur, and retailer, has returned to America, ready to woo stylish New Yorkers with two new restaurants and a high-end home-furnishings emporium. Nestled at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge at the once bleak junction of 59th Street and First Avenue, Bridgemarket--Conran's latest venture--may not seem like the most obvious setting for a chic restaurant and a cutting-edge shop. But this choice of venue is hardly unusual for Conran. In the last decade he has repeatedly selected run-down buildings of architectural note, often in neglected areas, and transformed them into flourishing restaurants, bars, or stores.

Critics will be watching closely to see how he fares with Bridgemarket, his second attempt to succeed in the U.S. following an ill-fated run in the 1980s with a chain of midpriced home-furnishing stores called Conran's. Founded in 1977 as the American equivalent of his Habitat stores in Britain, the chain ran into trouble in the late Eighties after overexpanding to the suburbs. By 1990 Conran's company at the time, Storehouse, had sold the Conran's stores to CSI. That group went bankrupt in 1993.

But Conran has a talent for bouncing back. Indeed, judging by his booming restaurant business in London, he is confident of creating a similar buzz around Bridgemarket, making it a place to go in Manhattan. Guastavino's, a bust-ling brasserie-style restaurant seating 300 people, and Club Guastavino, the more exclusive dining area on the mezzanine level, occupy a stunning cathedral-like space, originally built as a market hall in 1914 (see "Bridgemarket's 86-Year History," page 79). The most notable details are the astonishing Piranesi-style arches and the ivory-colored vaulted ceiling.

The Terence Conran Shop occupies a vast basement area, extending 35,000 square feet under the floor of the hall. Shoppers enter the store via a glass-walled pavilion with a curving roof that runs in counterpoint to the slope of the Queensboro Bridge towering above.

Conran's ambitious Bridgemarket redevelopment mirrors a similar scheme he engineered at London's Butlers Wharf, formerly a desolate area by Tower Bridge. There, he built a "gastrodrome" complex comprising food shops and three restaurants including the acclaimed Le Pont de la Tour. Another notable project was the restoration of London's Michelin Building in Chelsea, built in 1901, much loved for its striking Art Nouveau and Art Deco features, such as a glass window showing Mr. Bib-endum--the inflatable-tire man--quaffing a glass of wine. Conran added two new floors and a bold glass front that became the entrance to The Conran Shop. At the Fulham Road end, he created Bibendum, a hugely successful restaurant with an oyster bar serving high-end brasserie food.

Conran shows no signs of slowing down. Three weeks before the opening of The Terence Conran Shop in New York, he launched Aurora, the grand dining room of the newly renovated Great Eastern Hotel in London. (Sur-prisingly the only hotel within London's financial district, the Great Eastern was built alongside Liverpool Street Station in 1884 by Charles Barry and his son during the golden age of railway travel.)

After Aurora, Conran rushed to Stockholm to open the restaurant Berns in a restored concert hall dating from 1863. Conran's penchant for over-the-top detail is evident in the dining room, which features a huge "shellfish altar" stacked with pyramids of lobsters, crabs, and oysters beneath a glass etching of a giant lobster.

Terence Orby Conran was born in 1931. He excelled at carpentry, metalwork, and pottery at the progressive boarding school, Bryanston, and at 16 he enrolled as a student in textile design at London's Central School of Art. After leaving college, he started making furniture with the architect Dennis Lennon and became aware of Charles Eames. Conran still cites Eames as one of his favorite designers, along with Mies van der Rohe and Buckminster Fuller.

In 1964 he founded the immensely influential Habitat chain of stores, which helped to realize his desire to bring simple, modern design to the masses. This grew into the giant international Storehouse chain that included Mothercare, Richard Shops, Heal's, British Home Stores, and Blazer. In 1983 Conran was knighted for his services to British industry and design.

A few years later, however, Conran's retail empire began to falter, plagued by management blunders and a weakening British economy. Critics were quick to write off Conran; he ap-peared to be finished as a major force in retail. But Conran's decision to step down as chairman of the ailing Storehouse group in 1990 marked a significant turning point. Before leaving the company, he made the wise decision to buy back The Conran Shop, based in the Michelin Building, for £3.5 million. Showing remarkable resilience in the face of negative press, Conran redirected his efforts toward his high-end home-furnishings store and his fledgling restaurant business.

The turnaround has been phenomenal. Apart from the extension of his retail empire to Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Hamburg, and Düsseldorf, he has arguably contributed more than any other individual to the transformation of London over the last 10 years into a leading restaurant capital. Recently I met up with Conran at his office, located alongside the Design Museum at But-lers Wharf. Sipping a cup of tea and leaning back in his black Eames lounge chair, he ap-peared remarkably relaxed as he contemplated the challenges of his latest New York venture.

Minna Lacey: How did you first come across the Bridgemarket site?
Terence Conran: About five years ago we were looking for a space for a Conran Shop. At the end of a tiring day the real estate agent said, "Oh, look, there is another site, I'm not recommending it, but it is interesting and you ought to have a look at it."

ML What was it like
TC: The site was surrounded by barbed wire and a chain-link fence, and when we got inside I suddenly sensed a sort of stirring. There were half a dozen old tramps just sleeping there in this amazing space. Then wild dogs jumped out. It was very frightening. The site was in a deplorable state. A lot of the tiles were down, the windows were broken, it was shabby be-yond belief, but I got very ex-cited and decided to find out more about it.

ML What was the main attraction of the Bridgemarket site?
TC: The architecture, the Guastavino tiling, the scale of it. The fact that it was under a bridge, that it was in a derelict section of a rather rich area, that Manhattan people always seem to appreciate it when another part of their city is refurbished. And the fact that this space had lain unused for all this period of time right under their noses.

ML: What was the most challenging part of the Bridgemarket project?
TC: The most difficult thing was dealing with three different parties: the department of transportation, which has been working on the bridge for a number of years; the landmarks commission (because it's a landmarked site you have to ask them for permission to do anything); and thirdly, a developer named Sheldon Gordon, who has had a lease on the space for almost 20 years.

ML: You signed a lease with Gordon for the store and restaurant space. What happened when you realized that you were to share Bridgemarket with a local supermarket chain, Food Emporium?
TC: When we signed the lease, we were very careful to specify what kind of food market we would share the Bridgemarket space with. Orig-inally, a company called Wholefoods had signed the lease, then about two years ago they decided not to go ahead. Gordon then went with Food Emporium, but we didn't consider them to match up to the terms of our lease, so we had a legal case. The final result was that Food Em-porium agreed to do things in a way that meets the terms of our lease. I think our company, along with the landmarks commission, has influenced them to do something a bit more upmarket than they usually do.

ML: Is there someone else you would have preferred as a fellow tenant?
TC: I wanted something like Dean & Deluca, or Balducci's. That was my dream of a perfect fit.

ML: What about Guastavino's? Is it like your other restaurants?
TC: On one level it's like Bluebird Cafe, spreading out into the forecourt. Then it's Quaglino's on the ground floor, and maybe Bibendum on the first floor. The bar is maybe a bit like Mezzo, and it's all in this one space so that when people enter they go, "Phew!"

ML: What about competition to The Terence Conran Shop? Is it as competitive as the restaurant scene?
TC: We have had our buying team out for a year and they have done a huge amount of research on our competition. They have always said that you could probably put a Conran Shop together if you went to around a dozen smaller stores. Certainly you would get the feel of a Conran Shop, but you would have to make a number of different visits to put it all together. I saw an opportunity when I went to a restaurant on 86th Street and after supper I walked all the way down Madison Avenue. I saw fantastic clothes and accessories, shoes, handbags, really cutting-edge stuff, but no modern furniture. I thought, Why are people thinking this way about clothing, yet there's nothing that brackets that taste for the home? It's happening now, with stores like the DKNY shop, which has brought furniture and clothing together.

ML: Many retailers are threatened by e-commerce. Do you share their fears? TC: Every retailer has that threat. It used to be mail-order catalogs. But with something like home furnishing, the majority of merchandise is our own brand, so you are not going to find it elsewhere. Secondly, I believe that the sort of people buying our furniture want to see it, touch it, feel it, smell it. Thirdly, we shall certainly have our own e-commerce site available. With stores in Paris, London, New York, Berlin, and Tokyo, we have a spread of stores, which will support our brand.

ML: Are you worried about this being your second attempt to succeed in the American market?
TC: Not at all. I've got the advantage of knowing about retailing in America quite well. Our Habitat-style stores [Conran's] were considerably downmarket from The Conran Shop. Conran's opened in 1977, and I think taste has changed dramatically since then, certainly on the East Coast. If you were affluent at that time, you would furnish your home with reproduction furniture. It would all look like an American dream of an English country house. But now the mood is optimistic. We're Modernists in the new millennium. Why shouldn't we be proud of what we're doing at this moment in time? Why shouldn't we want the best modern furniture?

ML: There are certain design classics that will always be popular--for example, that Eames chair you are sitting on.
TC: When I was a student I was enormously inspired by what was going on in the West Coast, and the only way I could see it was in Arts & Architecture magazine. I saw then what people like Charles Eames were doing. But Eames was never out there in front of the general public. So he had limited influence over the mass market. Ultimately, taste is influenced by what people are offered and what they can buy. Back then high design was for a privileged minority who were taken into decorator showrooms like pet poodles. Decorators really didn't want cutting-edge design to appear on Main Street. Today young Americans would not dream of doing that. People are beginning to realize that there is something emasculating about having something terribly important in your life chosen by somebody else. It's like having your ideal husband chosen for you.

ML: But if people buy a lot of furniture from your shop, aren't they sacrificing their individual style in some way?
TC: We can give you all the facts and information, but at the end of the day I want to go into your home and know a bit more about you as a person. I don't want it to look as if it has come out of a Conran's or IKEA catalog. I want to see what you bring to it. I want to see what you have found in markets, or things you've inherited. You may put them together in a way that I may not personally like, but I like it because it is you. What I don't like is when you can see that someone has just employed a personal decorator to do it for them. If you can't be interested in the way your home looks then can you really be an interesting person?

ML: Have you thought about opening in Los Angeles or San Francisco?
TC: Everyone asks me this, but it's taken five years to get this Bridgemarket project going in Manhattan. Let's just get things settled down and trading. People are always asking me why I bother to open new things. I've got enough money, and they ask me why I should constantly do these things that are such a challenge, like opening in New York or Tokyo or Stockholm. To me it really has to do with the pleasure of the project, the excitement of doing these things, and also because we have sufficiently ambitious young people in the business who are always eager for new challenges.

ML: Do you ever take time off?
TC: Even in my house in the country I have converted all the old farm buildings into workshops so I've actually got a furniture factory churning away within four minutes' walk from my back door. Every now and again I like to crash out and swim and lie in the sand and read books, but it only lasts for about three or four days. I am the luckiest of all people because my hobby is what I do for a living: designing, writing, cooking, gardening. The thing that I really enjoy is this cross-fertilization of ideas and things that have to do with design, aesthetic pleasure, and beauty. Minna Lacey is a London-based writer.

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