B is for Bauhaus, Y is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World from A to Z (2015)

If Habitat was once the Elizabeth David of the domestic world, established by Terence Conran to rescue the British middle classes from Anaglypta wall finishes and electric fires that did their unimpressive best to impersonate burning logs, Ingvar Kamprad’s IKEA is more like Delia Smith. IKEA is cheaper, unavoidable, and ready to take short cuts with half a can of mushroom soup. Its impact has been all but universal, present everywhere from northern Europe to China. Its designs are derived from precedents devised by others, yet it has had far more impact on the way that everyday life is lived than the Bauhaus and the Design Council put together.

Habitat, which for a while became a small part of the IKEA empire, then came close to death, stood for freerange design. IKEA, with its vast supplier factories that each year turn endless acres of Slovakian and Latvian pine forests into self-assembly chipboard shelves, is the battery chicken of home-making - extremely cheap, filling, but not exactly about the subtler flavours, and with worrying implications for the environment.

Habitat, and its founder, had wider cultural ambitions than IKEA. What really makes Conran stand out as a designer is his ability to create a way of life that other people want to live too. Many critics have compared department stores with museums. Conran opened a lot of shops and built a museum. He opened the Boilerhouse Project in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s basement, an undertaking that had a very particular idea of what both design and museums should be about. It involved a certain amount of friction; he was pushing museums in directions they didn’t necessarily want to take. So much so that Conran once suggested taxidermy for the Victoria and Albert Museum’s director at the time, the exquisite Sir Roy Strong: stuffing him, putting him in a glass case and turning him into an exhibit in his own museum, on the grounds that his languid moustache, along with his weakness for brown velvet suits with tulip lapels, made him a valuable period piece in urgent need of preservation.

But Conran himself probably represents a more revealing insight into the shifting tastes of contemporary Britain. He went to France as a student and he wanted everyone to enjoy the heavy white crockery, the enamel coffee pots and the garlic presses that he found there. So he opened a shop to sell them. He got interested in cooking so he opened a restaurant. He designed furniture, but nobody else would sell it, so he started his own shop to do the job. And when he believed that Britain had lost sight of what Design with an upper-case D should be, he set up the Boilerhouse Project to stage a series of exhibitions intended to remind us that design was about mass production and the future rather than silver snuff boxes. It was at this point that Roy Strong got the rough edge of his tongue, shortly after which the Boilerhouse packed its bags and set up as the Design Museum in a Conran-owned building in Southwark.

Conran is no missionary, but making money was never the whole point for him. He discovered design very much in the way that he discovered good food, simply from a sense of curiosity, and, having done so, he wanted everybody to have it. ‘Given the choice between something that is well designed, and something that isn’t, I’ve always assumed that people would choose the former,’ says Conran.

Conran, who began Habitat in 1964, has done as much as anybody could to shape our dreams of the domestic good life and our attitudes to the things that we use, and the way we live. My kitchen in the Clapham of the early 1980s had a cork-tiled floor which I bought at the big Habitat store in the King’s Road. I installed the Habitat kitchen units with pine uprights and melamine surfaces myself. I hung three chrome metal lampshades aligned in a row above the butcher-block table, at which I had four killingly uncomfortable folding red-stained beechwood chairs made in Yugoslavia, with a Gitane-blue durrie on the floor. Every item had come from Habitat. As had the wallpaper, which was brown and cream with an outsize basket-weave pattern.

The twists and turns of Conran’s early career are the story of post-war design in Britain. As the country emerged from wartime austerity, the then still stick-thin young Conran was zipping back and forth between his Earl’s Court flat and the studio he shared with Eduardo Paolozzi in the East End on his newly acquired Vespa, one of the first imported from Italy. ‘He taught me how to make risotto nero,’ Conran remembers, ‘and I taught him how to weld.’ He was at the Dome of Discovery for the Festival of Britain. In the 1950s, he officiated over a very stylish espresso machine in his first café, the Soup Kitchen, in his striped shirts and three-inch-wide braces. He opened the first Habitat off the King’s Road just ahead of the Swinging London explosion in the 1960s, by which time he had sprouted sideburns. He defined the middle-class living room in the 1970s with his distinctive blend of cantilevered chrome-plated steel Bauhaus armchairs, modular seating units and whimsical antiques. And in the 1990s, he moved beyond the domestic world to invent the giant restaurant, creating a new version of public life. Conran made restaurants on an industrial scale, big enough to function as a species of street theatre, and triggered a desperate shortage of chefs and waiters in the process. So successful was the Conran approach to restaurants that, for a while, having one suddenly became a must-have status symbol for ambitious provincial cities on the make. Glasgow for one was ready to put public money into persuading Conran to open up there.

Conran is not in the business of creating objects that beat you over the head with their personality; instead he calls his designs ‘plain, simple and useful’. They are not aggressively modern, but rely on comfortable, simple materials, especially timber. And many of them are made in the workshop that Conran set up in the grounds of his country house in Berkshire with two young furniture-makers in 1983. They remind you of the ingenuity of the schoolboy Conran, who once made his own potter’s wheel and kiln from pieces of an old camshaft. As designs, they are engaging and touchingly English, the product of a magpie eye and a feeling for making things.

Conran style works not because people want to be like him, but because he has a knack of creating a way of life that anybody can buy into, a way of life that includes fresh coffee and holidays in France, going out to unflashy restaurants, and gardening in a stylish manner. It was never about conspicuous consumption; bright new plastic chairs could sit comfortably next to junk-shop finds and the occasional antique. It began as the style of choice of the strapped-for-cash student, the young professional setting up home for the first time, and bit by bit it almost imperceptibly elbowed aside what had gone before to become the signature style of grown-up Britain, a generational shift that had its apotheosis on the night that the Blairs took Bill and Hillary Clinton for dinner at the Pont de la Tour, Conran’s Thameside restaurant. And of course it’s also taken on some of the aura of a period piece, albeit a period piece that is already the subject of a nostalgic revival.

The world according to Conran is an attempt to make ordinary, banal places a little out of the ordinary. The Habitat catalogues brilliantly encapsulated that world, and made us all feel as if we were putting our noses to the glass to peep in on somebody else’s Christmas. Even from the other side of the glass it looks so attainable, not grand, not posh, but comfortable. It’s about dreams, of course; France as we would like it to be, not the way it really is, and of family life as it ought to be.

IKEA, born in 1943 when Kamprad was just seventeen, is still a family-owned business, despite an interlocking thicket of holding companies, licences, Dutch-based trusts and foundations, and one that has been far more successful as a business and in its impact on the world than Habitat. It has 150,000 employees, sales of around £27 billion a year and stores in heading for fifty countries. It is, by any standards, a remarkable company; not least because it has been astonishingly successful by doing things entirely its own way. It turned home furnishing from a cottage industry into a multinational production line. It was brilliant at getting its products reduced to the simplest elements that could fill trucks to capacity, and sourcing production from the cheapest possible suppliers. And it has proved that consumers from Hong Kong to Russia, and Dubai to Wembley, are happy to make their own homes with exactly the same raw materials.

IKEA arrived in Britain in the 1990s, entirely unknown, and it now has eighteen giant stores in the country. It was not just that it made Britain shop for furniture differently: ready to set off for those giant out-of-town blue sheds, and come home with a boot full of flatpack chipboard and an Allen key. It also changed how British homes look. IKEA ignored pretty much all the conventional wisdom about what Britain likes, and how it likes to do things.

Despite Habitat’s high-profile success in the 1970s, the vast majority in Britain still took the view that modern design was a piece of chilly good taste of the kind that the well-bred attempted to inflict on those less fortunate than themselves; lingering memories of wartime utility furniture, the tables, chairs and wardrobes designed by the best of Britain’s designers to make the most of rationing to help the bombed-out, and newly-married-made simplicity and modernity irretrievably associated with hard times. When they had the chance to choose for themselves, the vast majority of the population looked in the opposite direction. The misconceived attempts of the Design Council to show Britain what good design was all about - log-effect electric fires were bad design, unadorned naked electric bars were good design - did not help.

IKEA’s stuff is not just cheap. It is designed intelligently, and it looks as if it belongs to the real world rather than suggesting that it is trying to be something that it is not. IKEA’s product range is firmly in the modern design camp. It also comes equipped with names that are easy to mock.

Most companies, if they had a product range that was designed with an entirely different audience in mind, especially one named after an unpronounceable selection of Swedes, Finnish vegetables and Norwegian cities, might consider some sort of modification of how things looked, and even a bit of rebranding.

IKEA’s strategy was to go on the offensive. It was not the company that had got things wrong, it was British consumers who needed re-educating and reprogramming. Famously IKEA set out to persuade us to chuck out the chintz, and flock to its checkout tills to ask, perhaps with a little hesitation at first, for the Jerker desk. And then for all those other ranges, called things like the Stiby, the Kubbio and the Knos. Who cares that Moker is a ridiculous name for a desk lamp? It only costs £2.75.

Astonishingly, the strategy worked. Shopping for a new kitchen used to be a once-in-a-lifetime affair. At such low prices, it’s become more like buying a new outfit every Saturday at Top Shop. The IKEA formula was so successful that by the end of the 1990s, when I was living in Glasgow and the company had not yet crossed the border from England, Scotland was so hungry for Klippan shelves and crockery that there were people making a reasonable living by taking orders from customers, driving down to Newcastle to fetch the IKEA product shown in the catalogue, delivering, assembling and installing it.

It’s not just nostalgia and the antiques business that IKEA has tried to educate us. The company turned its fire on to the design world too. Its advertising agency in Britain invented Van Den Puup, a designer superstar with Cruella De Vil’s wardrobe and the self-deprecating modesty of Philippe Starck. He was the frontman for a remarkably well-funded pressure group called Elite Designers against IKEA. It claimed to be dedicated to stamping out cheap furniture. ‘We are,’ said its manifesto,

the elite designers. We design profound and beautiful furniture for those with the wealth and taste, which is why IKEA makes us furious, livid and angry. Do their designs live, breathe and growl? Are they born from tears of pain? Do they gently touch the bottom of the human soul? Pah, of course not. No more than weeds can attract a bee. The big blue place is odious. Its affordable design is sickeningly shallow, and we loathe it, even more than we loathe football. Please join us in our unqualified hatred.

It was of course an advertising campaign, but one with a curiously mixed message. IKEA was trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, it was suggesting that designers are time-expired buffoons, monstrous, egotistical figures of fun, a view that can sometimes be hard to disagree with. It is also saying that IKEA does it better and cheaper than the rest; a line that could be understood to mean that it’s OK to be taken for a ride, provided that you haven’t paid too much for the privilege. Would Top Shop, say, be likely to bite the hands that feed it to run a campaign lampooning Vivienne Westwood and Karl Lagerfeld?

Its catalogue is still devoted to the same message. Design without the designer price is the mantra it keeps repeating. If you are prepared to spend the day in a giant, city-killing, edge-of-town IKEA shed, lining up to wait for your sofa, shelves and kitchen cabinets to show up, and then negotiate self-assembly instructions that are not for the faint-hearted, then you can equip pretty much an entire flat for the price of one upmarket sofa. And provided that you don’t start examining how things are made, or worrying about how long upholstery that has been stapled into position is going to last, then it will look pretty good.

IKEA has done a lot for the way that we all live. It has given us cheap, simple kitchens, affordable, comfortable sofas. But it has also played its part in the unravelling of the fabric of our cities, and turned shopping for furniture into a pretty exact facsimile of negotiating Terminal 5 at Heathrow on a bad day.