....ANOTHER ONE BITES THE DUST.....

......This last weekend saw the final demise of Habitat here in the UK , the high-street furniture / lifestyle shop that seems to have been around forever ; its ultimate failure was , they say , down to its inability to adapt. Adapt to what.........?

......It's difficult now , from this point in time , to appreciate how groundbreaking and important the Habitat shops - and even more so the catalogues - were when they first started appearing in the late 'sixties. The first and second generation of design students to come through the art college system - and ' design ' rather than 'art ' is the operative word here - were just about starting out on their professional careers to become the first wave of what is now the Design Profession , and wanted a lifestyle to match the design-led experience of their time at college. Out with the austerity and tiredness of their parent's world , a generation exhausted by the Second World War and its aftermath , in with a bright new future. Enter Habitat , providing the furniture , the fabrics , the kitchen accessories and the clean ' Provencal ' vision of a lifestyle looking forward towards the brightness of the continent rather than backwards to dark utility furniture and those heavily patterned carpets.

Terrance Conran had a vision , to bring contemporary homeware and furnishings to the masses at an affordable price, and the aspiring middle classes loved it - a set of the early Habitat catalogues through to around 1980 or so would tell you all you need to know about the history of design in the home ; it's all there , at 30p a time. It couldn't last , but essentially the ultimate ' failure ' of the Habitat chain is down to the fact that during its time it was enormously successful  and achieved everything that it set out to do , changing the public face of design in the UK for ever . Conran's importance as both  retailer and restaurateur cannot be overstated - single-handedly he dragged the high street into the second half of the 20th century.

Habitat had eventually run its course and its time was up ; the design world has changed out of all recognition in the past forty years or so . Designers pour out of the colleges at the rate of some 5,000 or so a year , designers set up their own branded businesses and outlets, design magazines proliferate , the entire globe is sourced for designs and inspiration , everyone is now their own design guru. To say Habitat failed ' because it couldn't adapt ' is to miss the point entirely ; it's a bit like saying the Beatles failed because they couldn't adapt to all the genres that comprise the current musical scene . The Beatles kicked down the door and everyone else followed ; likewise Conran and Habitat kicked down their own door and made it possible for everything that followed in the world of design on the High Street , and for this we should owe them an enormous debt of gratitude...............

...............and remember them fondly for those heady days of the early seventies when we could furnish our first homes as WE wanted, red enamel coffee pot , chicken brick and all........