Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen Wire: a new exhibition documenting the career of Terence Conran has provoked a flurry of media interest in the man who founded retail brand Habitat and London’s Design Museum.

In a video filmed at the exhibition Terence Conran: The Way We Live Now, Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic tells The Guardian‘s design critic Jonathan Glancey that Conran is “a serial entrepreneur [whose] energy is extraordinary.” Glancey explains that the exhibition demonstrates how, as Conran developed his empire of stores and restaurants, “his love for hedonism and easy living stayed.”

BBC Radio 4 broadcast an interview in which Conran reveals that he has given so much of his personal wealth to the Design Museum that he is “not sitting on a large amount of capital” – BBC

In the Evening Standard Conran states that the Design Museum’s future home in South Kensington “will be a must-visit place just as Tate Modern has become a must-visit place,” and in The Express he adds that he hopes the current exhibition will be “an inspiration for schoolchildren and young designers to see what you can achieve in the design world.”

See a blog post by Elle Decoration editor Michelle Ogundehin lamenting the decline of Habitat and a previous story in which The Observer’s Rowan Moore suggests that Conran is a more successful businessman than designer.

Terence Conran: The Way We Live Now is on show at the Design Museum until 4 March