Fabulous Dead People | Decorator Bill Willis

For four decades, the architect and decorator Bill Willis was the unlikely point man in Morocco for voluptuous houses redolent of concubines and the woozy, opium-fogged dreamscapes of 19th-century Western painters like Georges Clairin. Nothing in his background — Willis was from Memphis and spoke French with an unforgettable Delta drawl — suggested that one day he would be reviving zellij mosaic work or polishing rendered walls with river stones and waxing them with savon noir to an alabaster sheen.

Having jump-started high-end Islamic architecture and rescued those Eastern design elements on the verge of extinction, Willis prompted a hundred style books (of which even he would probably agree 97 are redundant). An Orientalist in the tradition of Clairin, he appropriated an aesthetic language, then reinvented it. If anyone in the West beyond decorative arts scholars knows what zellij is today, Willis, who died last year at 72, gets the laurels. Gettys, Rothschilds and Agnellis queued up for his services, employing him to share his fastidious knowledge of keyhole arches, honeycomb vaulting and Moorish garden pavilions.

“Everything at Dar es Saada is laid out with an order in which I can safely deposit my disorder,” Yves Saint Laurent said of the first Marrakesh house that Willis designed for him and Pierre Bergé. Willis’s oeuvre made an important contribution not merely to the lush life of North Africa, says Bergé, but also to the Moroccan arts: “It was Bill who coined the design vocabulary of today’s Morocco. Even if he was from the South and drank too much bourbon, he was not American. He struck America from his life.”

When Bergé and Saint Laurent hired Willis a second time, it was to collaborate with the decorator Jacques Grange on Villa Oasis, built by the painter Jacques Majorelle in 1924. Grange is fond of saying that his late colleague had so many disciples, “we can speak today of the school of Bill Willis.”

Paleys and Rockefellers braved the dust and chickens of the Marrakesh medina to visit Willis in his thickly layered lair, once the harem of a minor 18th-century royal. American interior designers, from David Easton to Stephen Sills, also made the trip — part pilgrimage, part primer. I met Willis in his adopted city in 1986 during a marathon of celebrations for King Hassan II’s Silver Jubilee. “You think the royal palaces are grand,” Mary McFadden, traveling with the society decorators Chessy Raynor and Mica Ertegun, could be heard to crow. “There’s a rotunda at Marie-Hélène’s as big as a cathedral.” She was referring to Baroness Guy de Rothschild, for whom Willis built a villa from scratch. He was also meant to furnish it. But as he was infamous for never making an appearance before 2 p.m., artist and patron fell out. Darling Bill was replaced by Geoffrey Bennison.

“His energies and his appetites were prodigious, his hours unusual,” Christopher Gibbs, the British antiques dealer, said in his eulogy for Willis. “There was just enough time left to entertain delightfully and almost enough left over to work on the projects he took on.” At fete after fete during the Jubilee, Willis — who was notorious for his withering two-word character eviscerations — held the ladies in his thrall. But by then he had traded his almost impossible beauty for a prematurely ravaged look — very Keith Richards, hippie-eyeliner chic — that became as much a trademark as the fireplaces he created using hundreds of tiles laid in a dozen eye-bending patterns. In the 1990s, Willis received Sills at home at the end of a long candlelit hallway dressed in a caftan and lying on a sofa with several hundred pillows “like something out of The Arabian Nights,” says Sills. “It was ingenious of Bill to bring back all those exotic Moroccan color schemes, like peacock blue with goldenrod and terracotta. He was a rarefied bird — very charming, grand, very clever. And kind of mean.” Easton met Willis in New York in the ’60s at the jeweler Fulco di Verdura’s. They dined together decades later at the Marrakesh restaurant Dar Yacout, whose Willis-designed cocktail of low-slung banquettes and giant colored-glass lanterns remains intact.

Much of Willis’s work is seen admiringly as an homage to the French writer Pierre Loti, an observer on the French mission to the court of Sultan Moulay Hassan in 1889. Out of that trip came Loti’s “In Morocco.” Willis never reconstructed, as Loti did, a mosque whose stones were hauled to France from Damascus. But he would have understood.

Willis was the only child of parents who divorced when he was still a boy. He was sent to military school and orphaned in his teens, “told on returning from a wild, illicit night out,” Gibbs says, “that his mother had slipped down a cliff” and perished. In 1956, he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, returning to the States to work for the powerhouse dealer-decorator Roslyn Rosier in New York. In 1963, he opened an interior design practice and antiques shop in Rome, where he also designed home accessories for Valentino. (For Saint Laurent, it would be bath towels). Three years later, Willis gave his best friends John Paul Getty Jr. and his wife, Talitha, who would die of a heroin overdose in 1971, a Moroccan honeymoon as a wedding present. Willis tagged along. The “gave” is part of the Willis mythology: He was always broke.

The trip ended in Marrakesh. “None of us wanted to leave,” he said, so the Gettys bought the Palais de la Zahia, commissioned by the Glaoui of Marrakesh in the 18th century. Willis waved his wand and set up housekeeping with the couple “to live a kind of dolce vita.” Entertainment for their legendarily druggy parties was recruited from the Djemma el Fna marketplace. “Tea boys” balanced trays of mint tea and burning candles on their feet. Willis did up the Zahia twice more: for Alain Delon, who purchased it from the Gettys, and for its current owner Bernard-Henri Lévy.

Willis got his own palace in 1973 and never budged. In his eulogy, Gibbs went on to say that because of his pal’s “willful nature, his unusual mix of indolence and exigence, the way he allowed his desires and enthusiasms to rule his life,” he was “surprisingly unsung in the great wide world, never having achieved the material successes granted to many infinitely less gifted.” Willis in recent years had stopped working and his health had declined, according to Marian McEvoy, a minor member of the Saint Laurent cabal through her long friendship with the garden designer Madison Cox. “He didn’t leave the house much and stopped answering the phone,” she says. The designer died of a brain hemorrhage with scarce notice of his death anywhere, “more or less forgotten,” Bergé says. No beautiful room goes unpunished.