Conran: The Perfect Canvas For Your Food

The Conran family kitchen dynasty includes father Terence Orby Conran who, apart from running many successful UK restaurants, a successful retailer, and being one of the early movers and shakers in modern kitchen design, penned famous books such as The Kitchen Book, among many others. Daughter Sophie Conran is famous for her cars, pies and design. You may recall the distinctive white “ripple-shaped” Sophie Conran tableware lines carried by PortMerion in Canada.

Brother Sebastian Conran is the UK designer heading Universal Expert, which provides “simple, functional and elegant designs and traditional materials that provide the perfect canvas for your food.” His new collection has won the coveted Red Dot Award 2014 for innovative, high quality product design.

We had the pleasure of meeting Sebastian Conran in our summer travels and he truly seems to be a quirky, fun-loving Londonner, with a strong penchant for thoughtful design. Involved in all aspects of the design process, Sebastian tests his products in his home: “If it’s not good enough for me, then it’s certainly not good enough for our customers”. He proudly showed us how his butter dish tipped upside down, how his chopping block with undercarriage tray solved the onions-now-on-the-floor problem, how his decanter worked as an aerator and decanter, and could stand upside-down on the counter after a quick rinse. Clever, simple and quality products for any home chef. Read about it more at Universal Expert, or come into Zocalo and see them in person!

From our table, to yours, we wish you good food, on great canvases, shared with friends and family.