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In Memoriam
Desmond Guinness, Cofounder of Irish Georgian Society,
Dies at 88
Guinness and his wife, Mariga, brought Irish Georgian
architecture, furniture, and art onto the international stage in the 1960s
By Mitchell
Owens
August 21,
2020
There was
an enormous amount of gin consumed the afternoon that I met Desmond Guinness, a
cofounder of the Irish Georgian Society, who died on Thursday, age 88. Which
explains why my memories, decades ago, are fragmented. The location was his
flat on the King’s Road in London, where he lived with his second wife. I
recall a steep flight of stairs and the aforementioned alcohol; I was
generously overserved. Joined by my great friend Barrie McIntyre, the archivist
of Sibyl Colefax & John Fowler, we talked about many subjects aesthetic—the
dangerous beauty Daisy Fellowes, Guinness’s restoration of the Irish country
house Castletown, his memories of the 1951 Beistegui Ball, et cetera. I also
have a dim memory of Penny Guinness, walking in toward the end of my visit,
seeing us both tanked well before the official cocktail hour, and admonishing
her husband with, “Oh, Desmond, how could you?!” (I think they were expected
somewhere for dinner.) Down the stairs Barrie and I sheepishly crept, me hoping
against hope that my farewell descent, though unsteady, possessed some sort of
dignity.
Blessed
with a crystalline profile and glacier-blue eyes (“I got the pretty one,” his
first wife once said, comparing him to his Oxford University classmates),
Guinness was born in 1931, the elder son of the Hon. Bryan Guinness, the future
second Baron Moyne, a member of the Irish beer and banking dynasty who also
happened to be a poet. His mother was a more complicated creature. With a
beauty that admirers compared to that of a Greek goddess, the Hon. Diana
Mitford, a sister of novelist Nancy Mitford, abandoned Guinness’s father in
1932 for the arms of the married Sir Oswald Mosley, sixth baronet, the
charismatic leader of the British Union of Fascists. After he was widowed, they
were secretly married in 1936 in Berlin, at the home of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi
propaganda chief, with Adolf Hitler as the guest of honor. (Among Lady Mosley’s
jewels was a diamond swastika brooch.) It was a union so politically scandalous
that Lady Mosley, declared a “public danger” by MI5, was incarcerated at
London’s Holloway Prison for three years with Sir Oswald, followed by house
arrest. Small wonder that, for a time, she was called “the most hated woman in
Britain.”
Days after
graduating Christ Church, Oxford, in 1954, Desmond Guinness married Her Serene
Highness Princess Marie-Gabrielle von Urach, a.k.a. Mariga, the dynamic
half-Scottish granddaughter of a onetime king of Lithuania and a relative of
Prince Rainier III of Monaco. The Guinnesses were a meteoric pair, him with his
staggering looks, dashing personality, and deep pockets, and her with her
extravagant gestures, high energy, and vintage clothes. Soon after their
marriage, they decamped to Ireland, where the plight of 18th-century
architecture—largely denigrated, willfully ignored, and being knocked down by
developers—led them to establish the Irish Georgian Society in 1958.
As the New
York Times observed in a 2008 profile, “Given that they did not have to work
for a living (Mr. Guinness lived off family money), they were in a rare
position, they realized, to do something about it.” The brewery scion
cheerfully agreed, adding, “You know, we were free. We didn’t have to go to the
office every morning.” That same year, he and his wife bought Leixlip Castle,
not terribly far from Dublin, and restored the 12th-century fortress
themselves, using brilliant paint colors and employing a shared eccentric eye,
so much so that it became one of the most memorable interiors that Horst P.
Horst photographed for Vogue. After having two children, the Guinnesses
separated in 1969 and divorced in 1981. (Mariga Guinness died eight years later
and is buried beneath Conolly’s Folly, an ornamental 18th-century structure
that they saved in the 1960s.) His survivors include his wife, the former
Penelope Cuthbertson, a Lucian Freud muse, whom he married in 1984; a son and
daughter from his first marriage, historian and former Irish Georgian Society
president Patrick Guinness and Irish-music patron Marina Guinness; and several
grandchildren, among them fashion model Jasmine Guinness. One of his nieces is
Daphne Guinness, the fashion icon and singer.
Aided and
abetted by likeminded friends such as Desmond FitzGerald, 29th Knight of Glin,
the vibrant young Guinnesses put Irish Georgian architecture, furniture, art,
and decorative arts onto the international stage in the 1960s, winning the
respect of previously sniffy scholars as well as connoisseurs who snapped up
fine Irish antiques at then-bargain prices. In a visit that resulted in
international headlines, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis stopped by to see their
restoration of Castletown House, the country’s biggest Palladian residence, in
1967, shortly after the Guinnesses acquired the abandoned property for
$259,000. “The lead was being stripped from the roof,” Desmond Guinness
recalled in a 1998 newspaper interview. “People were ripping out the light
switches and so on, but luckily the fireplaces weren’t stolen.” In the decades
since, swaths of Dublin and other cities have been saved from bulldozers by the
Irish Georgian Society, while the organization’s viewpoint has broadened to
include the conservation of significant buildings of many periods.
“I regard
these houses as works of art,” Guinness told the New York Times in 1985. “But
the survival of the Irish country house is a matter of chance and luck, because
of the negative attitude on the part of our government toward our architectural
heritage. The trouble is, when we wake up to it, in many cases it will be too
late. We're a very small organization, compared to the projects we tackle, and
we're always trying to think of ways of making money, which we put into
buildings.” That included a licensing agreement with American furniture company
Kindel, which launched a collection of Irish Georgian reproductions that same
year.
A gifted
writer with a puckish wit—he was for a time a contributor to AD—Guinness also
wrote and co-authored several seminal books, including Portrait of Dublin
(1967), Georgian Dublin (1979), and Irish Houses & Castles (1973). As the
Irish Independent observed in 1999, “In an age when the quality of much writing
appears often to be in inverse proportion to the quality produced, Desmond
Guinness reigns supreme.” Irish style was a subject that fascinated him until
his final days, whether it was the discovery of an obscure craftsman of long
ago or a historic building in need of attention. In an Instagram tribute, AD100
interior designer Steven Gambrel recalled dining at Leixlip Castle with the
Guinnesses some years ago, where “we poured endless glasses…and drank well into
the night discussing Georgian houses.” It was, he added, “a life highlight.
A 50-Year Battle to Save Old Ireland
largest
Palladian house, above, was one of Desmond Guinness’s biggest victories.
By
Christopher Hann
Nov. 26,
2008
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/27/garden/27irish.html
WHEN
Desmond and Mariga Guinness first lived here in the 1950s, they were unlikely
champions of Irish architecture. Mrs. Guinness, the daughter of a German
prince, had grown up in Europe and Japan, with no real link to Ireland. And
although Mr. Guinness had Irish roots going back more than two centuries, he
had been raised and educated in England (Oxford, class of ‘54).
But he was
a Guinness, descended from the 18th-century brewer who put the family name on
the lips of stout drinkers the world over. His father, Bryan Guinness, Lord
Moyne, kept a home in Ireland, and by the mid-’50s his mother, Diana, one of
the famous Mitford sisters, was living in County Cork with her second husband.
And Ireland’s long economic decline had made property far more affordable than
in England, making it an attractive alternative for the young couple, who moved
across the Irish Sea in 1956.
In the two
years they spent searching for a home, driving through the countryside and
making regular forays into Dublin from a house they rented in County Kildare,
the Guinnesses became familiar with the country’s architecture — particularly
its 18th-century buildings, from grand country homes to town houses filled with
working-class flats — and found themselves increasingly
bothered by its state of decay. And given that they did not have to work for a
living (Mr. Guinness lived off family money), they were in a rare position,
they realized, to do something about it.
In February
1958 they announced plans to re-establish the Irish Georgian Society, a group
that had created a photographic record of Dublin’s best Georgian buildings
earlier in the century; this new version, Mr. Guinness wrote in The Irish
Times, would “fight for the protection of what is left of Georgian architecture
in Ireland.” The following month they began restoring a building of their own,
Leixlip Castle, a dilapidated 12th-century fortress on 182 acres west of
Dublin, which would be their home and the group’s headquarters.
Now
observing its 50th year with a series of celebrations and a lavishly
illustrated book, the revived Irish Georgian Society has been credited with
restoring dozens of architectural gems across Ireland, from a former union hall
for Dublin tailors to the country’s oldest Palladian house. (The society’s
early preservation efforts focused on Georgian Dublin, but in later years it
expanded its mission to cover noteworthy buildings from any period.) Perhaps more
impressively, the group has helped bring about a national change of heart
regarding Irish architecture.
“We weren’t
the only people concerned, but we had the time and the youth — 50 years ago
— and not much to do,” said Mr.
Guinness, now 77, as he reclined in the circular sitting room at Leixlip,
beside one of the castle’s 20
fireplaces. He still lives here, now with his second wife, Penelope, whom he
married three years after his divorce from Mariga in 1981. “You know,” he
continued, “we were free. We didn’t have to go to the office every morning.”
Free or
not, Mr. Guinness and his followers faced a tall order. Saving old buildings
was hardly a priority in Ireland in 1958. The year before, more than 50,000
Irish citizens emigrated and 78,000 were unemployed. There were few, amid the
grinding poverty, able to maintain a 200-year-old mansion. Many Irish people
also reviled the lavish Georgian buildings for their association with the
British occupation. “May the crows roost in its rafters,” one farmer is said to
have remarked about the large house on his family’s land.
Meanwhile,
the Irish government had neither the money nor much inclination to support
preservation. Some officials openly assailed the Irish Georgian Society as
elitist, a charge that endures to a lesser degree today. In 1966 the Lord Mayor
of Dublin dismissed the society’s efforts, saying ordinary citizens had “little
sympathy with the sentimental nonsense of persons who had never experienced bad
housing conditions.”
Mr.
Guinness was equally dismissive in return. “We were confronting a philistine
state,” he said, a point that was driven home to him one day in 1957 when he
saw workers systematically dismantling a pair of 18th-century houses on Kildare
Place in Dublin. The city, which owned the houses, planned to demolish them in
favor of new construction.
“People on
the roof slinging slates down from perfectly good, beautiful buildings, with
red-brick facades and good interiors,” recalled Mr. Guinness, indignation still
evident in his voice. “And now they’d be worth millions.”
Mr. and
Mrs. Guinness envisioned their group as a guardian of the nation’s
architectural heritage, never mind that neither had formal training in
architecture, Irish or otherwise. With 16 volunteers — Trinity
College professors and students, friends who owned country houses and some whom
Mr. Guinness called “ordinary civilized people” — they set out to spread their
preservation ethos.
“They did
start a quest, a sort of mission, when Irish 18th-century buildings were
completely unfashionable,” said Desmond FitzGerald, the Knight of Glin, an
early convert to the Guinness cause and, since 1991, president of the Irish
Georgian Society.
The
Guinnesses led members of the society on regular scouting missions to view
buildings at risk. They lobbied local and national authorities, reminding
policy makers that Irish craftsmen had constructed these buildings. They held
cricket matches and galas and lectures to raise money, and Mr. Guinness, and
later Mr. FitzGerald, began traveling to the United States to lecture on Irish
architecture and design.
Two
projects in particular helped galvanize public support for the society’s work.
The first was Mountjoy Square, a cluster of town houses in north-central Dublin
that dated to 1791. By the early 1960s, many of them had been abandoned, and a
developer was buying them up with plans to replace them with a large office
development. In 1964, the Guinnesses intervened, buying a single decrepit
property, 50 Mountjoy Square, that stood in the middle of the proposed
construction. The standoff got plenty of attention in the Irish press, and two
years later a court hearing resulted in the developer’s backing out of the
project.
The
following year Mr. Guinness wielded his checkbook again, buying what many
considered the most important house in Ireland for $259,000. The house,
Castletown, in County Kildare, was the country’s largest Palladian house and
the only one designed by the Italian architect Alessandro Galilei. It was built
starting in the 1720s for William Conolly, the speaker of the Irish House of
Commons, and had been in the Conolly family for nearly 250 years.
But by 1967
Castletown had been abandoned for two years. A housing development had recently
sprouted next door, and an auction of its possessions, accumulated over two
centuries, had left it virtually empty. Preservationists worried that it could
succumb to the whims of a short-sighted developer. To buy it, Mr. Guinness
borrowed against a trust he would come into in a few years.
Led by the
Guinnesses — who, for aristocrats, were unabashedly
bohemian and did not shy from taking a paintbrush in hand or climbing a ladder
to remove moldy wallpaper — an army of volunteers descended on
Castletown. Donors supplied period furnishings to fill its vast rooms, and that
summer, Castletown opened its doors for visitors. Jacqueline Kennedy made a
surprise visit and was given a well-publicized tour. Today, Castletown is owned
by the Irish government and remains open to the public.
“When you
think that that house was nearly lost to dereliction,” Mr. FitzGerald said.
Mr.
FitzGerald, now 71, studied art history at Harvard and has written about Irish
art, furniture and architecture. He also knows a few things about restoring old
houses. Glin Castle, his home in County Limerick, has been in his family for
700 years. He inherited it when he was just 12, after the death of his father
in 1949. At that point, according to Mr. FitzGerald, the family had no money
and the house was in disrepair. His stepfather, a Canadian businessman, saved
it, he said.
Today Mr.
FitzGerald and his wife, Olda, live in a wing of Glin Castle, which they
operate as a 15-room hotel. (They have a second home in Dublin.) His own
experience, he believes, underscores the importance of preservation to Ireland.
“I think we need the historic houses if we’re going to set ourselves up in the
grand shop of tourism that the rest of Europe takes part in,” he said.
Under his
leadership, the Irish Georgian Society operates on an annual budget of less
than $1 million, raised from private donors. Based in Dublin, it keeps an
office on Manhattan’s Upper East Side; 600 of its roughly 3,000 members live in
the United States and provide two-thirds of its funding.
The group
now publishes an annual scholarly journal, gives scholarships to Irish students
of architecture and preservation, conducts trips abroad to historic sites and
funds grants for restoration projects, like the recent repair of a conical roof
at the 15th-century Barmeath Castle in County Louth.
This year
the society organized a series of fund-raising events for its golden
anniversary, to pay for restoring the “eating parlor” at Headfort, an
18th-century estate in County Meath, in its original colors — what Mr.
FitzGerald called “a very intricate and complicated paint job.” The parlor, a
high-ceilinged room with ornate plasterwork, is part of a suite of six rooms
designed in the neoclassical style by the renowned Scottish architect Robert
Adam. They are the only rooms he designed in Ireland that are known to exist.
LEIXLIP
CASTLE has its own place in Irish Georgian Society lore. For many years it
served as the organization’s de facto clubhouse, the scene of picnics and
parties and a magnet for glitterati. (Mr. Guinness remembers Mick Jagger and
Marianne Faithfull visiting in the 1960s and walking off into the grass just as
lunch was being served. “I suppose they got bored with our conversation,” he
said.)
Over the
years, the Guinnesses have outfitted their home with objects largely reaped
from native soil. The library’s gilt mirror, which Mr. Guinness bought at the
Castletown auction in 1966, was made by John and Francis Booker, premiere
mirror makers of mid-18th century Dublin. Mr. Guinness bought the dining room
sideboard at a 1973 auction at nearby Malahide Castle. The 1740s Kilkenny
marble chimneypiece in the front hall came from Ardgillan Castle in County
Dublin. Mr. Guinness acquired it around 1960 by swapping the Victorian
fireplace that had been in the front hall.
“I try to
collect Irish furniture and pictures,” Mr. Guinness said. “And you used to be
able to buy it very cheaply. Now people have discovered it.”
He has only
himself to blame. Mr. Guinness, who has written extensively about Irish
architecture and design, received an award in 2006 from Queen Sofia of Spain on
behalf of Europa Nostra, a pan-European cultural heritage group, which cited
his “fifty years of unrelenting voluntary efforts” on behalf of Ireland’s
architectural heritage. The following month the Irish government provided about
$645,000 in start-up funds for the Irish Heritage Trust, an independent charity
designed to take ownership of historic properties.
Kevin
Baird, the executive director, said the trust is just the sort of
government-sanctioned body for which the Irish Georgian Society had long
lobbied. “The Georgians deserve huge praise,” Mr. Baird said. “They were
swimming against the tide for so long, and they were instrumental in turning
that tide.”
That the
tide had truly turned became evident last month, when the society published a
book by Robert O’Byrne, an Irish journalist, documenting its history. The
foreword, which described the society as “a fine example of the extraordinary
lasting effect that a small but committed organisation can have,” was written
by Mary McAleese, the president of Ireland.
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