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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.
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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.”
