Terence Conran, a London designer and retailing magnate who eased the gloom of postwar British austerity with stylish home furnishings affordable on a teacher’s salary, and then suffered financial reverses before reinventing himself as an international restaurateur and doyen of modern design, died on Saturday at his country home in Berkshire, England. He was 88.
His family confirmed the death in a statement, without specifying the cause.
Blind in one eye since childhood, Mr. Conran was an entrepreneur of mercurial moods and missionary zeal who created an empire to market his designs, stores known in Europe as Habitat and in America as Conran Shops. After his business declined, he opened restaurants in London, Paris and New York — notably Guastavino’s, a dining cathedral under the tiled terra-cotta arches of the Queensboro Bridge in Manhattan.
He wrote scores of books on design, cooking and other subjects; turned a London warehouse riverfront into a fashionable South Bank commercial development; founded the Design Museum, Britain’s only museum for contemporary products and architectural designs; and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. He also married four times, had five children and collected wildflowers, butterflies, old master paintings and Bugatti pedal cars.
Detractors called him a cynical self-promoter who sold simplistic ideas to the masses, like “democratized luxury,” and struck it rich with a sure thing: the inevitable desire of Britons to climb from grinding wartime privations into a consumer class that could afford to replace the threadbare old sofa with something seen as “modern” and in “good taste.”
But admirers said he tried, with remarkable success, to revolutionize the sensibilities of a rising British middle class, offering not just better food but an idea of what a sunlit breakfast on Sunday should be; not just mod touches for the drab suburban semidetached but a taste of la dolce vita: Scandinavian furniture, Italian lighting, French cookware, Bauhaus-style modular shelving and splashes of Pop Art on the walls.
In a career that spanned six decades, he had only one actual job: At 19, he worked briefly for an architect who helped design the 1951 Festival of Britain, a national exposition intended to give Britons a sense of recovery from the war. It also gave him a frank look at a people weary of shortages, and a glimpse of the future of commercial design.
“They came along in their dreary wartime mackintoshes, gas-mask cases filled with Spam sandwiches, and found bright cafes, music, flowers, modern furniture and a spirit of something that none of them had ever experienced in their lives,” Mr. Conran told The Daily Telegraph, the British newspaper, in 2011.
Over the next decade, he designed simple furniture and sold it in an arcade in Piccadilly; opened his first restaurant, a sandwich-and-salad bar called Soup Kitchen that had one of London’s first espresso makers; and created new lines of fabrics and moderately priced, functional home furnishings.
In 1964, he opened his first Habitat store in Chelsea. Its staff had uniforms by Mary Quant and hairstyles by Vidal Sassoon.
By the late 1980s, after acquiring other chains, he owned 900 stores in Britain, Europe, Japan and America, selling furniture, housewares and clothing. His company, the Storehouse Group, had 35,000 employees and billions in revenues.
But overexpansion — including additions to the upscale Butler’s Wharf on the Thames, where he installed his Design Museum in 1989 and lived in a glass penthouse — corroded his empire. So did his failure to integrate interests reaching into publishing, office products, architecture and real estate. He resigned as chairman in 1990. Storehouse was dismantled, and Habitat was taken over by Ikea, the Swedish furniture giant.
Mr. Conran kept some Conran Shops and recovered in the 1990s, opening many theatrically dazzling restaurants, including Le Pont de la Tour and Mezzo in London, Alcazar in Paris and Berns Salonger in Stockholm. In New York, he and his partner, Joel Kissin, opened Guastavino’s in 2000 under the Queensboro Bridge. The site was dramatic but out of the way, and a few years later became a catered event space.
In 2005, he was named the most influential restaurateur in Britain by CatererSearch, the website of Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine, and his resurrected fortune was estimated at more than $100 million.
Terence Orby Conran was born on Oct. 4, 1931, in the London suburb Kingston upon Thames, to Gerard and Christina (Halstead) Conran. His father was a businessman. His mother, who had a taste for art, nurtured Terence’s creative talents. When he was 13, his left eye was permanently blinded by a sliver of metal that flew up from a lathe he was using.
He attended Bryanston, a private school in Dorset, and the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. He did not graduate, but a teacher there, the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, became a lifelong friend and mentor.
His first marriage, at the age of 19 to the architect Brenda Davison, lasted six months. He and his second wife, the novelist Shirley Pearce, had two children, Sebastian and Jasper, designers who held various professional and executive positions with their father’s enterprises over the years; they were divorced in 1962. He and his third wife, the food writer Caroline Herbert, had three children, Edmund (known as Ned), Tom and Sophie, and were divorced in 1996. He married his fourth wife, Victoria Davis, in 2000.
He is survived by his wife and his children, as well as 14 grandchildren, one great-grandchild and a sister, Priscilla, a designer and restaurateur.
Mr. Conran became a disciple of Elizabeth David, whose books Europeanized British cooking. Besides design and cooking, his own books explored home furnishings, textiles, gardening and other subjects. An authorized biography, “Terence Conran,” by Nicholas Ind, was published in 1995.
In addition to his 145-acre estate in Berkshire, Barton Court, Mr. Conran had an apartment in London.
From 2003 to 2011, Mr. Conran was provost of the Royal College of Art in London. Besides his 1983 knighthood, a title he said he used only to make reservations, his honors included the Minerva Medal, the highest award of the Chartered Society of Designers, and the Prince Phillip Designers Prize for lifetime achievement.
Alex Marshall contributed reporting from London.
