Tuesday 23rd April 2013

With great sadness I record the death of Virgil Grayson, world-renowned architect and also marvellous gardener, this gone Saturday. He was 75. First known to me in the late 70s, he was a remarkable beacon, inspiration and haven in those far-off days. Here was experimentation and bold living without fuss and tiresome belligerence. His self-designed home was a revelation, a large London terraced house in the Belsize district, but with all the floors moved about and the back of the building sliced off entirely and replaced by glass panels. When his then-partner returned to America, the farewell party was ferried in stretch-limos through the November night – from the disused laundry room of the Trellick Tower (important Arno Goldfinger design), where oysters were served from the drums of the washing machines, to a mews in South Kensington for an outdoor display of drag and finally, at dawn’s crack, to freezing Hampstead Heath. It was an astonishing public carnival in the time when Gays had only just been found to be legal.

Virgil was gentle and welcoming and tolerant. Although twenty years older, he always seemed young and never claimed to know better. He bore, of course, a core of steel. How else were the buildings to be got exactly right. ‘I can’t put my name to that window,’ I heard him saying to a somewhat cowed assistant in his office. Not all could grasp the message which lies at the core of Poor Little Rich Gay life: nothing but perfection will do. Sometimes wine glasses near Virgil exploded spontaneously from the determination of it all.

Yet Virgil encouraged and helped a whole generation of younger architects, most notably our own dear Bruce MacBain, my private architect, and precious Archie Armitage. He began us all, as owners, in houses. Without him we would never have had a clue nor become what we afterwards became.

When a builder announced that my first home, at Savage Gardens, Portobello Road, was about to fall down and, having hacked off all the rendering and removed the bathroom roof, refused to continue work, Virgil was enormously kind, lunched at once (I did a greengage tart from Jane Grigson), reassured and provided a surveyor from his office as well as a team of delightful Irish builders to take over . In those days one was too fraught with money-worries ever to be properly grateful, I fear.

More recently we have enjoyed spells at Virgil’s house-and-garden Côte-side paradise on the Côte, near which I sadly passed on Sunday 7th April in a taxi ferrying Val and I from our cruise ship at St Tropez to Toulon-Hyères airport, whence we boarded for London.