Nobody here said, "Get Dixon". At the time I'd just set up my company Eurolounge. That was an investment-heavy thing and I was desperate to get out and make things - metalwork, what-have-you. So I was dabbling with the idea of doing some consultancy whilst Eurolounge found its feet. Then I found out that there was a job going here, so I applied for it. I think that the reason I got it is that I speak French - my Mum's half French. At the time it looked as though the whole organisation was going to move to France, and they were looking for people who were bilingual. For a long time, in Terence's day, it had been managed separately in France and England, but these days the only way to stay afloat is to be international - having one headquarters, not two.

I've got a pretty broad understanding of stuff, I'm a bit of a jack of all trades. I have dabbled in retail, I had a little shop, I've dabbled in craft, I know quite a lot about industry as well. So three years ago now I joined Habitat. At first I was in charge only of the English design team, then a year later the teams merged.

It was very antique. There wasn't a computer in the design studio, there wasn't any real energy or understanding of what design could do. I think design was seen as a bit of a problem, rather than a solution or a resource. In the design department we still don't have a remit to do the windows, or the catalogues, or the shop architecture. But that's slowly changing, and for me that's the most important part - to have a single view over the whole business.

We used to change sixty per cent of the range every year, which was unsustainable, especially if you were dealing with larger items such as sofas and chairs. So we slowed that down dramatically. We do design the majority of the things we have in the shops. Then there are things that we just re-colour or adapt, or are traditional. In the old days, Terence used to have a furniture factory, but he was also a buyer with an eye. For years it was Habitat's business, and there was nobody else on the market who did it. So any Indian rug, cane chair or whatever - we were the only place you could get that kind of stuff. So we led a privileged life. But more and more, the only way to be different is to have your own designed collection. That way there's some degree of exclusivity in what we sell.

When we revived the veteran designer Robin Day's famous 1963 Polyprop chair, they hadn't used the mould for 15 years. The market had been flooded with copies. They sold reasonably well, but didn't take off in quite the way we'd thought they would. We're giving them another shot this year in gorgeous metallic colours. Other revivals sell immensely well, there's no rhyme nor reason to it, there are hundreds of factors. Terence was always very good at that - feeling what might be right, anticipating people's desires. He was a bit peeved they hadn't done these classic re-editions for the Conran Shop. Robin Day's in here all the time now. His revived Forum seating is really working. But I don't know if that's because it's Robin, or because it's timeless, or just because people like leather at the moment.

From a marketing point of view the re-editions were great, they re-attached us to what we were doing before. We had some hits and some misses, but what they did for the morale of the organisation - making people here aware of what Habitat's history was - was really valuable. In England, Habitat still has a place in people's hearts as a brand. We are very independent of Ikea.

I do other projects, but I'm consumed by this. It's quite a big job to get to grips with, it's a very disparate organisation. It needs a lot of input to get some kind of unity, and I don't feel like I'm making enough progress. An average day is loads of meetings, until you get liberated by being able to go out and see the factories, or buy things for the seasonal collections. We tend to work like a fashion company, we do three seasons a year. It keeps people coming in, it keeps things fresh. We'll soon be launching Christmas 2001 to the press, and I've already started work on Christmas 2002. Sometimes I think I'm living in a permanent Santa land.

We fit firmly in between the Ikeas and the Conran Shops of the world. It's a very comfortable place, and a place where I feel much happier than I did when I was making elite designed furniture for rich people. That's what I learned from all those old codgers like Robin Day - they really believed that they could change people's lives for the better. We might not be able to change everybody's lives, but we can at least help people who are interested in that kind of thing to get better quality gear. I believe the opportunities at this level are vast."