To discover Bill and Sybil Baird in the 1960s in Sutton on Dublin Bay's northern shore, as I was privileged to do, was like suddenly encountering a vivid, midperiod Picasso in an exhibition of worthy, but rather dull Academy portraits.
My first meeting with Sybil is imprinted on my mind. A particularly awkward and rather lonely 14 year old, I had gone to the Baird household, looking to see my new friend David. He was out, but the door was opened by a suburban matron quite unlike any I had ever met in my short, conventional life: a smiling, openhearted and very beautiful woman with cascading strawberry blonde hair which looked as if it had never seen a hairdresser and probably hadn't, dressed in a white blouse and a pair of jeans absolutely covered in every shade of paint.
This was Mrs Baird, and, despite all appearances to the contrary, no Bohemian, but, as I was constantly to discover over the next 30 years, a homebuilder of calm quietude, a teacher, much loved and fondly remembered by her pupils, of Sunday School at Howth Presbyterian Church, a constant source of peace to all who visited her home, and, on the rare occasions when formality was called for, a wonderfully, never flamboyantly, elegant lady, never deserted by what seemed an innate sense of what was appropriate, whatever the circumstances.
But there was more: as Dr Bill O'Neill, Minister of Howth, said to the congregation on that sad day in March when we laid her to rest, Sybil combined in her personality gentleness with real strength. The psychological security this bestowed on her family, including her grandchildren, is something for which everyone who knew her will forever esteem her.
It was an effective foil to Bill's personality, in which the artist was of necessity constantly in a state of tension with the scrupulous professional man he always remained. One of Ireland's leading architects, one of only a handful of, his profession in his generation who were ever admitted to Fellowship of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, Bill specialised in the restoration of Ireland's more glorious Georgian residences. Sir Alfred and Lady Clementine Beit of Russborough and Tony Reilly at Castlemartin were among the clients whose homes were returned to their former glory under Bill's careful guardianship.
But Bill was much more as an architect than a beautifier of earlier architects' work. The houses and other buildings he designed as a partner in the Dublin practice Kaye Parry had an unmistakeable Baird stamp. Germanic or Nordic in tone with highpitched, sloping roofs and discreet fenestration they, like their creator, combined several qualities in being solid, unpretentious, distinctive and unique. His exquisite Presbyterian Church at Malahide and the Lifeboat house in Howth harbour exemplify the style.
But as Dr O'Neill remarked, again, wisely, at Bill's funeral service in May, there was an artist in this architect who longed for freedom from the tyranny of professional responsibility. This expressed itself in many ways, especially through his love of sailing and the sea, and of painting.
A first class dinghy sailor in his youth, Bill won many prizes at regattas in the Dublin area, in the 1930s and 40s, and, with his good companion Brian Campbell and others, he set up the Kilbarrack Sailing Club, of which he served a term as Commodore. Later, Bill sailed his own small cruisers, including the beloved Antic, on quiet adventures among the estuaries of Fingal. and on the Shannon at Laugh Rea.
A more literal expression of his love of the spiritual and the aesthetic were his excellent watercolours and pastels, of Greek islands, the West of Ireland and his beloved Sutton. It is no small measure of his skill that when Sir Alfred Beit came to choose paintings for his bedroom at Russborough, it was not to Vermeer or other Old Masters he turned, but to Bill's serene seascapes.
Bill also loved the poetry and song of Robbie Burns. This last is a pointer to what was possibly the most romantic aspect of Bill's personality. Despite his patronage by the gilded rich, he respected nothing so much as the honest poverty of ordinary human kind: no more democratic and independent mind did his friends ever encounter. Bill was nothing if not his own man in all matters, be they professional or personal. He can't be fitted into any convenient mould. his soul would fret in the shadow of anything as stifling as an orthodoxy.
To have known this couple was a form of liberation. No people can have a finer epitaph, in my view.