Francis Fleetwood, a popular East Hampton, New York–based architect whose romantic country houses appeared in the pages of Architectural Digest over the years, died on May 8 at age 68.
A colleague of Philip Johnson before he founded, in 1980, the firm that became Fleetwood & McMullan, the Chilean-born architect was greatly influenced by the Gilded Age work of McKim, Mead & White, creating handsome, usually sprawling residences in the Shingle Style. Picturesque and idiosyncratic, his oeuvre—namely hundreds of grand commissions on Long Island—was rich in details. Among these were towering chimneys, eyebrow windows, sweeping colonnades and verandas, gambrel roofs, towers, and rooflines that brought to mind the silhouettes of Chinese pagodas—or, perhaps, echoed the possibility that the client’s fortune had been established during the 19th-century China trade.
“I think people are looking for roots,” Fleetwood, whose clients included Calvin Klein, Paul McCartney, and Lauren Bacall, once told The New York Times. “They’d all love to be born into a grand old house that had been handed down through the generations.” And, he added, surely with a grin, “So would I.”
