"I found this framed picture of Terence Conran around the place. It was about to go into a skip. So I hauled him out. I just thought it was funny that the organisation used to have these photographs up in the offices. Terence phones me up if he thinks I've got something wrong, if he feels some wrong item has slipped into the range somehow. He's watching all the time. It doesn't bother me in the least. Terence really is authentically interested.

You know what Terence is like: he picks up everything, looks underneath. I suppose that's the difference with what the organisation had turned into. It had become a retail business that was interested in moving products, rather than one that was primarily interested in the products it sells. It had become a middle-aged company, very different to the way it was first created.

At the beginning, Habitat was a retail environment that was a shock to people. There were Vidal Sassoon haircuts and Mary Quant uniforms. They played music, which was radical at the time. They had wire shopping baskets, that had only previously been seen in supermarkets. All of those things were exciting, fresh and new. It was a bit of a late Sixties thing - Sainsbury's and John Lewis and Galt Toys had very strong identities at the time, too. Really bold, simple stuff, but very refreshing, well considered all along the line. I think that more recently we've been in some senses quite lazy. The shops still haven't got the unity that they used to have. We're still a place that is slightly more pleasant than our rivals, but we've got to do a lot of work to be truly evocative like that. We're lucky that nobody else is doing it.

The business is divided between furniture, and everything that's not furniture. So Matthew (Hilton) does the furniture and Georgina (Godley) does textiles, decoration, table-top items, everything else. I'd made a start on the products, but it's a long-winded process. It takes about a year and a half to get the stuff into the shops. So my idea was that if I got the right people in, I'd probably be able to spend a bit more time on the peripheral things, which I think are as important, such as the way the shops look. That's my big battle at the moment.