The age of Conran

But didn't he fancy a bit of a break? Apparently not. 'Retirement has never been in my mind. I think the moment you give up active life, you're on a path to death,' he announces baldly. 'I don't feel ready for that. I've got masses of ideas and plenty of energy. All my life I've done things; built businesses, made new projects. Everyone says I must be daft to have a woodworking factory in my garden, but it gives me enormous pleasure to make things happen. I run the Conran shops and Conran & Partners, our design side; I'm writing two books and I have a very productive vegetable garden.'

He's also been appointed a 'business ambassador' by Gordon Brown, and is off to Tokyo in a few days, setting up conferences with architects and designers to boost the reputation of Britain's creative industries.

Phew! So will he work till he drops? 'I hope so,' he says. Later, Lady Conran admits rather despairingly that she recently tried to get him to come away with her on a fortnight's cruise. 'He lasted three days,' she confesses.

Terence Conran first fell in love with the restaurant business 57 years ago, when he got himself a job as a plongeur (dishwasher) in a Parisian restaurant. 'It was called La Méditerranée in the place de l'Odéon,' he says with a reminiscent smile, taking a sip of Bloody Mary. 'I learned to wash enormous copper pans with silver sand. Then I got promoted to be a vegetable boy.'

George Orwell, who chronicled his experiences as a plongeur in Down and Out in Paris and London, considered the job the epitome of gross exploitation. But Conran clearly adored it. 'Restaurants are like a cockroach in my bloodstream,' he says. 'I caught the bug in Paris and it's been there ever since. I think if I hadn't been a designer, I might have been a chef.'

On his return to London, he started up his first restaurant, The Soup Kitchen on Chandos Place, off the Strand, and the rest is restaurant history. 'I've been doing them on and off for most of my life. It's ingrained in me to love restaurants and the whole business of designing them and staffing them. Running a restaurant is like running a shop, but the wonderful thing about them is that you're making the goods you're offering for sale.'

There must indeed be something addictive about the business. When I met Antonio Carluccio, Conran's brother-in-law, last summer - just before he was admitted to the Priory having stabbed himself in a fit of depression - he spoke about how much he missed having a restaurant, having sold his chain of Carluccio's cafés for a reported £10 million. His friends suspect that it was the lack of restaurant action that triggered the subsequent trouble. 'It's all very well building an empire,' his friend and fellow chef Aldo Zilli told me, 'but once you sell it, you've got nothing. True restaurateurs never stop; we die in our restaurants.'

'Antonio lives for his food,' Sir Terence agrees rather gruffly (Carluccio is something of a taboo subject, now that he's split from Priscilla Conran, Terence's sister, after more than 25 years of marriage). 'Once you've been in the restaurant business, you're always wanting to go back and make a big success.'

Conran, too, is no exception to this rule. So, in fact, the really odd thing is that it's taken him so long to come up with Boundary. Six decades in the restaurant business, and only now has he created the place he really wants to have dinner in himself.

'We always used to sit in other people's restaurants in Paris or Italy and write down what we liked,' explains Lady Conran. 'And the menu is what we've always wanted to do.' How come they never did it before? 'I don't really know. Perhaps it was never the right moment,' she says.

Or perhaps it takes 55 years of experience to have the confidence to launch something like Boundary in the teeth of a global recession.

For despite the building's charm, and Shoreditch's super-cool status, it is an undeniably risky gamble. There are plenty of Chelsea-dwelling restaurant-goers who wouldn't dream of muddying their Choos with the dust of East London, and especially not in these straitened times.

A lot of people would say you're insane, I tell them. 'Hurrah!' says Lady Conran brightly. 'They've been doing that all my life,' says Sir Terence, more sedately pleased. 'Quaglino's also opened in the depths of the early Nineties recession. And if you're brave enough to open in a recession, the public praises you. It gives me great pleasure to do things that appear to be so counterintuitive that they turn around and bite the sceptics in the bottom.'