Colourful and eccentric as he was, Jeremy Williams, who has died aged 72, nonetheless left a real legacy as an outstanding conservation architect, architectural historian and skilled draughtsman whose drawings of buildings were regarded widely as works of art.
The artist Martin Mooney, for whom Williams designed a beautiful neo-Palladian house at Ramelton, Co Donegal in the 1990s, so perfectly proportioned that casual visitors often assumed it was an eighteenth-century survivor, describes how Williams “would arrive up from Dublin with a leather satchel full of ink drawings which looked as if they were eighteenth-century originals”.
Another grateful client, Hugo Merry of Kilshannig House in Cork, one of Ireland’s best Palladian houses, remembers how, when Williams sat on a chair in its faded arcades during his restoration work there from the 1980s onwards, having “to reimagine what had once been there before”, he produced “very creative” ideas, restoring cupolas lost for over 100 years and accurate plans for redecoration in detail of interiors more than 200 years old.
Wide travel
Williams, who had spent a year after schooling at Glenstal Abbey at its fellow Benedictine school Maredsous in southern Belgium, and who thereafter travelled widely in continental Europe, had honed his drawing skills by visiting as many Gothic and Baroque cathedrals and palaces as he could.
Thus, Merry recalls, when he (Merry) wished to visit Venice for three days, Williams produced beautifully detailed sketches, from memory, of its principal buildings as a guide.
Williams, however, could also embrace the most modern technologies and be very innovative with them. The Dublin architect Alfred Cochrane, who was in professional partnership with Williams from 1980 to 1983, recalled that when commissioned to build a conservatory for Marlfield House Hotel near Gorey Williams produced a design, inspired by the great curvilinear conservatories by Turner at the National Botanic Gardens, which used tubular steel as a structural element “something quite revolutionary at the time”.
Versatility
He showed his versatility again in designing the striking contemporary mansion on Burlington Road in Dublin for property magnate
Johnny Ronan
, in an Italian palazzo style with murals by Michael Dillon, and in fashioning the blueprint for a façade for the Powerscourt Hotel at Enniskerry, Co Wicklow, based on a German
schloss
.
For his old school, Glenstal, the abbot of which, Mark Paul Hederman, was a celebrant at his funeral Mass at Duiske Abbey, he designed a Russo-Byzantine chapel.
His close friend, the art historian Nicola Gordon Bowe, perhaps got nearest to the secret of Williams's professional success when she said earlier this week that "he knew everything by looking at it; he'd been doing it since he was a schoolboy."
Indeed he had, getting into trouble at Glenstal for sketching his teachers in class. Later, accompanying Irish Times journalist Renagh Holohan around France for her book The Irish Chateaux, (1989) an account of the descendants of the "Wild Geese" and their fortunes in Europe, he produced beautifully detailed illustrations to accompany the text.
He had, says Gordon Bowe, a “lightness of touch and surety no one else could go near”.
As a writer himself, Williams produced an authoritative work on the architecture of Victorian pre-independent Ireland, Architecture in Ireland 1837-1921 , which reflected his great interest in a subject he had helped bring out of obscurity in his work to establish the Victorian Society in 1974.
Legacy
Part of his legacy too will be the memory among his numerous friends of his remarkable personality. A long-time neighbour in Dublin’s Liberties, David O’Grady, said Williams, who loved classical music and especially opera, “saw everything through an operatic lens. Everything was dramatic and passionate … he was a very special man. Nobody spoke like Jeremy, nobody laughed like Jeremy, nobody drove like Jeremy.”
The latter part of this tribute is a reference to Williams’s always less than thoroughly organised life. “He drove an unbelievable banger he never needed to lock, because no one would ever have wanted to steal it, and bought all his clothes in charity shops, old tweed jackets with pockets so full of holes that when his mobile rang he would take so long to find it people would have rung off by the time he did.”
Jeremy Williams was born one of twin sons of Dermot and Joan (née Roche) Williams of the well-known Tullamore distilling family in 1943, and, after his schooling, which had earlier included St Gerard’s School near Bray, Co Wicklow, graduated from University College, Dublin in architecture in the 1960s.
Never married, he is survived by his twin brother Johnny, sister-in-law Jane (née Daniell), and by a nephew, Justin (his godson), and niece Ciara.