Front seat

The elegant Boomerang coffee table and the Glove chair. Picture / Carolyn Elliott

Take a seat. And if you find you're not sitting comfortably, then Sir Terence Conran's latest range of furniture, Content by Conran, could be just the thing for you.

Nest's Ponsonby Rd store has some of the British design guru's chairs and sofas in which to seat yourself in total comfort. There's the Glove Chair, black leather on a stainless-steel pedestal base at $5695, which takes its cue from Arne Jacobsen's iconic Egg Chair of the 1950s.

Then there's Aspen, the white Italian leather chair so generously proportioned that it's almost as wide as a traditional two-seater. And there's the Aspen four-seater, duck-egg blue boucle number.

Store manager Fiona Graham says these are for lounging. The Ellipse linen-mix, loose-covered four-seater sofa and armchairs come with a new breed of foam that refuses to squash no matter how much sitting is done - get into this and it becomes very difficult to get up again.

Even the Stitch dining chairs, at $795 a piece, are pure comfort.

Conran has said that his Content range is, in effect, a return to early Habitat, but brought up to date.

Although the empire is now owned by Ikea, Conran opened his first Habitat store on Chelsea's Kings Rd in 1964, selling furniture and homeware postwar Britain had not seen before. He tempted a designer-conscious generation with French cookware, Indian rugs, Italian plastic, Asian woks, paper lanterns and affordable Conran-designed modernist furniture that was clean and simple.

Such a philosophy is evident in the latest range. The Boomerang glass-top table with European oak legs ($2995), Balance Shelving in solid European oak and Wobble wool rug are all beautiful studies in the art of simplicity.

"The designing took me back to my roots when I began as a furniture designer for the Festival of Britain in 1951," Conran told UK newspaper The Guardian. "The new furniture is certainly not the cutting-edge stuff of the Milan furniture fair, but I think it is fair to say that it represents a half-century's experience."

Graham says "it's beautiful furniture and is made from top-quality fabrics exclusive to Conran" and confesses she'd like it all for her home.

Content by Conran is available exclusively from Nest, 239 Ponsonby Rd.