The Williams LIbrary is preserved just as Bessie Williams left it in 1967. (Photo by Caroline Hubert)
It’s the talk of the town: This year marks 100 years of Agecroft Hall on Virginia soil.
In the 1920s, Bessie and T.C. Williams Jr. bought — sight unseen — and shipped the original Tudor manor from Lancashire, England, to Richmond. After reconfiguring the structure with architect Henry Morris, the Williamses moved into their new home in 1928. Bessie was the last to call Agecroft home until she withdrew in 1967, bequeathing it as a museum with the stipulation that the library remain exactly as it was when she had lived in it.
Just as it did decades ago, Bessie’s library captures a striking balance between personality and nostalgia, resonating with today’s new maximalist aesthetic.
First built circa 1500, the manor house underwent additions later that century, followed by the introduction of Jacobean Revival elements after a damaging fire in 1894. The Tudor wood paneling and hand-blown glass and leaded windows are original, though some may have been added, changed or rebuilt during the post-fire repairs. This includes four “remain” (carved) panels that could be mistaken for original English 16th-century Italian Renaissance-influenced panel carvings, though research dates them to the 19th century.
On a tour of Agecroft Hall, the sparsely furnished interiors exemplify fine Tudor, Jacobean and Jacobean Revival style. Period artifacts include early clocks and tapestries, court cupboards and marquetry, Delft pottery, and oriental ceramics and Japonism — art and decorative objects influenced by Japanese art and design. There’s even a faintly etched hexafoil mark over one of the fireplaces for warding off the supernatural.
Then the final room: the library. It’s embellished but not fussy. Elizabethan yet art deco. Packed but not jammed. So chock-full of personality, you feel you know Bessie a little.
Agecroft’s inner courtyard under construction in the 1920s (Photo courtesy Agecroft Hall & Gardens)
As old styles influence the new, and new styles reference — or even revive — the past, there is a temporal fluidity reflected in the library’s decor and architecture that places different designs in conversation with one another. The deep wood and colorful bindings in the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves encase the room. Those same wood tones carry upward, forming the bossed ribs of the original white coffered and flat-top vaulted ceiling. The ribs lead to Tudor panels on the back wall before traveling down to the enormous 17th-century Italian inlay and carved table spanning nearly the full length of the room. The table sits against the back of a Chesterfield settee in sage velvet, which comfortably faces the Tudor stone fireplace.
All around the periphery are cozy nooks created by complementary, but never quite matching, pieces: A pair of Jacobean Revival-style armchairs communes with a Queen Anne-style wing chair, an English Restoration-style chair, and a William and Mary-style table; an art deco record cabinet has a central, freestanding spotlight along with Chippendale ribbon chairs and a Georgian sofa, each positioned in dialogue around the library.
Arranged differently, this same collection of furniture might relay a different conversation, perhaps even a disorganized or confusing one. Instead, there is a powerful and invisible element at play in curating such an intriguing space: restraint.
