IT'S A CONRAN WORLD

In honor of today's opening of the New York City Conran Shop in it's new location—at ABC Carpet & Home, the epicenter of design in Manhattan, at least at the retail level—I have decided to offer a salute to Sir Terence, who set up his first design business in 1956 and has been charging like the Light Brigade ever since. With three of his four adult children following in his footsteps, you might well say he is as dynastic as he is dynamic. (The portrait of Old Smokey was taken by Dara Flynn for The Sunday Times of London in December 2009).

I first met his Designship at his duplex atop the company's offices on Shad Thames (that's a street on the formerly unfashionable south side of the river, east of the Tower Bridge). Once upon a sailing-schooner time, this was a thriving commercial area for trade in tea, coffee, and spices, but by the mid-1990s the magnificent red-brick warehouses, with their impressive above-the-street gantries, were empty and the cobbled streets abandoned. Here it is back in its first prime:

By the time Sir Terry and his fellow investors got hold if it, "Butler's Wharf" wasn't used much, except as a location for films that were set in (a) a scary place or (b) a historic place or (c) both of the above—films (and TV shows) like Dr. Who, The Elephant Man, The French Lieutenant's Woman, and, of course, Oliver! Dickens lived not far away in his salad days (although he probably didn't eat much salad).

Now the area is chic rather than cheap or cheeky. It's full of cafés and restaurants, high-end lofts, and the Design Museum, founded—you should not be surprised to learn—by Conran and a few like-minded artful dodgers in 1989. And here it is now, in a lovely evening photo by Luke Hayes:

Conran, as anyone who has met him can attest, is charming, erudite, witty, and charismatic. If he didn't smoke cigars, I'd want to be around him all the time. Not content to be the king of the design hill (sorry, Prince Charles, but it is not you), TC is also a restaurateur, hotelier, architect, interior decorator, author, and publisher. In fact, his best-selling The House Book (1974) is something of a Joy of Cooking for the kind of people who love to rearrange their furniture:

There have been many sequels and collateral tomes over the years, the latest of which, proving the old gent has a lot of young ideas, is The Eco House Book (2009):

Whenever I'm in London, I try to get to the Conran Shop there, the one in Chelsea, partly because it's adjacent to Bibendum, the restaurant the good Lord installed in the 1911 Michelin building on the Fulham Road. Have a look. If you haven't been there, go!

Bibendum, in case you didn't know, is the name of the Michelin Tire Man:

Here, as a relevant design aside, is a picture of the Bibendum chair, designed by Eileen Gray, one of Conran's chiefest inspirations. I think you can get why she gave it the moniker.

  

The first time I ever heard of Eileen Gray was from the man himself. He had a Gray settee in the entryway at Shad Thames. The apartment itself was an awakening. The natural light nearly knocked me over, and the combination of Conran designs, classic modernist pieces, and beautifully but casually displayed idiosyncratic collectibles really set the tone for a generation. The lightness, openness, transparency, and layered exposures of the design were everything (thankfully) Victorianism was not. The article I wrote about the meeting and the apartment ran in Metropolitan Home. (Have I mentioned today that Metropolitan Home is no more?)

Here now are some of the Big T's own furniture designs (lest you think he is only an entrepreneur): 

 

Meanwhile, at the New York Conran Shop, in the lower level of the ABC Home building (888 Broadway, at 19th Street, New York, NY 10003; 212/473-3000), you can choose among and between designs by Conran himself, those by such mid-century masters as Eames, Saarinen, Noguchi, and Panton, living legends like Philippe Starck, and the anonymous craftsmen who make some of the shop's most affordable pieces. Conran was and is a pioneer of the notion that the humble may live quite comfortably among the aristocratic. Many things in the stately home outside London that he shares with his wife (Mrs. Sir Conran #4) are more common than couture. It's how they are used that makes the whole seem so swell.

To tantalize, here are some of the pieces you might find at the new store, which—like a good bistro that uses only the freshest seasonal ingredients—is featuring outdoor furniture and accessories:

  

In closing, I'm going to let you have a little peek at the bathroom chez Conran, a room far larger than my apartment in New York, indeed larger than the footprint of the house in which I grew up. This image (by photographer David Garcia) is from Metropolitan Home DESIGN 100: The Last Word in Modern Interiors, which will be published by Filipacchi Publishing in September 2010-ish.

And have I mentioned that the book is being written by... me?—ML

GEHRY'S NEW THEATERS: An Inside Job

Well, cheer up New York City architecture lovers. Manhattan is about to get another Frank Gehry project. Granted it’s a small one, and you won’t actually be able to see much of it from the street, but at least it will be there (from what I can tell from photographs of the very handsome models, I already like it better than the iceberg Mr. G. built for Brrrrrry Diller on the West Side Highway).

The Signature Theatre Company has announced that, thanks to a $25 million grant from the city, its plans for a $60 million, 74,000-square-foot complex of three small theaters, two rehearsal spaces and a central lobby/bookstore/café—designed by the Titan of Titanium himself—will open in a building currently under construction at 42nd Street and 10th Avenue, former site of one of the Big Apple’s last authentic coffee shops (well, you can’t have everything). The developer had hoped to include a permanent home for Cirque du Soleil on the site, but the city decided that the Cirque was too commercial to qualify for municipal assistance and nixed the idea.)

What was not so hot for the existential Canadian circus was a cool opportunity for the folks at Signature, including founding artistic director James Houghton). The Signature, a standout in the world of not-for-profit companies, was at one point scheduled to have a new home in the phantom building allegedly going up at Ground Zero sometime or other (as things are moving, not before the turn of the next millennium). The 2010–11 season is the Signature’s 20th, and it will be marked by a year-long look at the work of resident playwright, Tony Kushner; the festival will include the first New York revival of his three-part Pulitzer-winning Angels in America (signaturetheatre.org)

As for his work in the affair, Gehry calls the project “elegant yet modest,” which is accurate enough. After all, they’re theaters; they function best in the dark. Still, there are some typical Gehry flourishes, and the center probably won’t be boring at least. The scheduled opening is 2012, but don't order your tickets just yet. The project has already been seriously delayed once by matters related to the economy.

 

And then there’s the impending tower itself, which may be the bad news that more than outweighs the Gehry good. Just what the up-and-coming skyscraper will look like is apparently a Big Secret. The developer, Related Properties, hired Florida-based Arquitectonica to design the building (they are the hands behind the Westin at 42nd and 8th Avenue and other, better-looking buildings, particularly in Miami). When pictures of the structure leaked to the web recently (from a posting on the site of the company subcontracted to produce the glazing), architecture buffs let out a collective howl of dismay at the soulless, anonymous glass box that will tower 59 unaffordable stories above one of the most congested intersections in Gotham (it’s virtually the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel).

The pix were yanked within hours, but way too late. Related claims that they are out-of-date and do not represent the current building plan. But the building is already under construction. Don’t the developers know what it’s going to look like? Is this the equivalent of a movie studio trying to release a stinker of a film without letting critics review it before it opens? How bad can it be? Pretty bad if it’s anything like the picture: anonymous, cold, uninspired—not a feather in Arquitectonica's cap.

Bad design is probably not the best way to get people to move in or visit (it’s approved as a combined hotel and apartment building). At the moment the intersection is two very long blocks to the nearest subway, especially in bad weather. There’s a bus, but chances are that Mayor Bloomberg and his lunatic transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, will shut it down and put up a few picnic tables in the crosswalk instead, as they have elsewhere in the city, making it next to impossible to move efficiently above ground. But that’s another gripe for another post. I wouldn’t want to be alarmist about the thing.—ML