The company saw profit fall last year due to higher transportation and raw material costs and expects supply issues to continue well into Ikea has acquired the former Topshop store on London's well-known shopping street, Oxford Street.
The plan is to open a new city store at the premises in the autumn of The Swedish furniture giant is chartering additional ships, buying more shipping containers, putting more effort into rail transport and moving goods between warehouses to mitigate the effects of the global logistics crisis. Skip to main content. Habitat founder Terence Conran passed away. Published in Furniture on Self-assembly before Ikea Britain has lost an icon: the interior designer Terence Conran died at the age of Restaurants and books Habitat expanded rapidly in the UK, after which the designer later took over the Mothercare and British Home Stores chains.
After its sale to Home Retail Group was announced, Habitat's founder, legendary lifestyle entrepreneur Terence Conran, who has not been involved with the business since , issued a statement: "I'm sad that my love child. Last October, a Knowledge Bank report on Habitat found "sharply declining sales", "soaring staff costs", and a seeming chaos of branch openings and closures, arriving and departing senior managers, head office relocations and emergency cash injections.
Customers can postpone their purchases. And yet, as Dixon puts it, "Habitat still retains a cachet of some sort. It was the destination, from the early 60s on, for the younger generation of married people who had disposable income.
Among other socially influential products, Habitat has pioneered or popularised duvets and bean bags, woks and paper lanterns, sofa beds and self-assembly furniture, cafetieres and wine racks. Habitat has reflected social change and has also changed Britain — for the better. With its branches historically concentrated in university towns and near gentrified inner-city suburbs, its story is partly that of the postwar expansion — and now possible contraction — of the British middle class.
As a member of the latter, I've been a Habitat customer, not always satisfied, for decades: sometimes its spotlit shops have seemed too hot, its young staff too cool and dozy, its range of merchandise too fixed and flimsy "Shabitat" is an enduring nickname. But Habitat, as Dixon says, has always been "an organisation based on a lot of intangibles: emotion, taste, snobbishness, aspiration.
Paying more than an object is worth is really what Habitat is about. For a surprisingly long time, that idea proved commercially viable. When he opened the first shop in , Conran was already a veteran of British domestic design and retail, then characterised by dour furniture stores and a few frustrated, more adventurous spirits like himself. Conran had been to France "bright colours. The Fulham Road Habitat was in a then-workaday part of west London near a greasy spoon and a pub.
But inside it felt like a new world : fresh white walls, cut flowers, piped music a first , staff dressed in the latest streamlined styles. The fashionable and famous flooded in. Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard did their courting in the basement; David Niven was found fighting to get in one day as the doors closed," writes Barty Phillips in Conran and the Habitat Story.
It was not the first shop to offer cosmopolitan modern design at cheap-ish prices: Design Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts , had been doing it since But Habitat was in a city and a country that was just discovering many of the things — Mediterranean food and travel, the allure of mass-manufactured goods, more informal ways of arranging rooms — that Conran was interested in.
He just had that knack," says Clark. In the 60s and 70s, young British adults, whether middle-class or working-class, had more money than ever before. In unprecedented numbers, they were buying property, moving away from home to study, cohabiting, taking up DIY. Habitat was on hand to help.
After decades of slow urban decay, Britain was full of cheap, vacant retail space; Habitat quickly spread out of London: to Manchester in , Brighton in , Bristol in , Glasgow in By the mids the company needed a new warehouse to improve its haphazard stock delivery; Conran, ever the showman, commissioned a facility so striking that national newspapers praised its design.
When the architects couldn't decide on a colour, Conran told them to match the colour of his Porsche, Phillips records. Habitat was in tune with both the materialism and egalitarianism of 70s Britain.
In Malcolm Bradbury's celebrated campus novel The History Man, set in , Barbara Kirk, one half of the book's central, leftwing "modern couple", has "two red canvas bags, Swiss, from Habitat".
In , it appeared to have hit pay dirt with Tom Dixon, one of the biggest names in British design. Dixon, who lasted 10 years as Habitat's design director, brought in a new generation of designers and products. But despite a revival of public interest, it wasn't enough. According to retail industry magazine Retail Week, Habitat has only made two annual profits since In , Habitat's 71 stores and 1, staff contracts were sold to private equity firm Hilco, who eventually entered the remaining branches into administration leaving just three London stores and an online sales business.
No matter how close in we can zoom or rotate virtual furniture nothing beats sitting in a chair, smelling a leather, hearing a cupboard door close or feeling the weight or finish of a object. Habitat still has my trust in terms of quality but I don't think I'd spend big money online without some real first hand experience first.
Elle Decoration editor Michelle Ogundehin declared the brand "as good as dead" in November , giving it just two years to die out completely. In an interview with Dezeen following her appointment in , Dickens said she was taking the brand "back to what Habitat was many years ago in the original Conran days, when people thought about it as colourful, good design and something that had a very strong personality. Production has been moved back to Europe and design brought back in-house as much as possible.
With a strong focus on affordability, Dickens now believes the brand can once again hold its own as long as it has "the right supplier base.
Despite some misgivings, there is still a lot of goodwill and affection felt by designers and collectors towards Habitat. In February this year, the branch on Tottenham Court Road that originally opened in was named one of London's top shops by city guide magazine Time Out.
It remains an instantly recognisable brand name in the UK and, even as new homeware stores arrive on the British high street, some feel that there is a niche to fill.
This is an unfulfilled role: there are some retailers with affordable products but dubious quality; there are those with good quality but not affordable; and then there are those that just sell boring and stupid stuff," he adds.
0コメント