A grand and gracious 25-room Gilded Age mansion comes with the job

PROVIDENCE, R.I. — “It’s a 7,000-square-foot house, and I am alone,” Crystal Williams said solemnly, about halfway through a four-hour tour of her Gilded Age residence in Providence, Rhode Island. She moved in two years ago, upon becoming the 18th president of the Rhode Island School of Design, and is not done arranging it. While hosting nonstop events there, she has staked claim to the interior, intertwining her favorite objects and hues with the creations of RISD faculty members, students and alumni.

“The house is a great vessel, just as the school is a great vessel,” she said. The building’s contents increasingly represent “a wide variety of art traditions and languages and viewpoints.” Her quarters also rank as “by far the grandest place” that she has lived during her peripatetic career as a poet and academic.

Her experiences in many respects typify life for contemporary college presidents, stewarding no-cost and expansive homes while bearing huge institutional responsibilities in the limelight. Her case is singular, however, in significant ways. Williams, 53, lives by herself, needing no one else’s approval for her décor choices, and she gets to choose from options provided by a school community that represents some of the field’s best talents.

The neocolonial home, fronted in bay windows and classical columns, is nestled among flower beds on Bowen Street in the College Hill neighborhood. It was built in the 1890s for the philanthropic Metcalf family, who made their fortune in textile manufacturing and spearheaded RISD’s founding in the 1870s. Descendants donated the building to the school in the 1950s, with well-preserved, delicate details such as mantelpieces sculpted with ribbons and garlands.

Williams first set foot inside in the fall of 2021 while serving as a vice president and associate provost at Boston University. “The grandeur of it, the graciousness of it, struck me,” she recalled.

While considering the RISD post, she consulted with colleagues, including Wendy Raymond, president of Haverford College. In a phone interview, Raymond, who is also a professor of biology, noted that there is an “always on display” aspect of presidential quarters, including her campus home, built in the late 1880s. The house, she said, “brings a lot of joy, connecting and building community.” There are opportunities, for instance, to welcome people to move chairs for their comfort in public spaces, leaf through books on the shelves and venture into the kitchen. Raymond will tell them, she said, “It’s important to me that you feel you belong here.”

Williams realized that her RISD home could use a few tweaks, to ensure that the space “hangs together in a way that I would want it to hang together,” she said. She spent early months of her presidency in a hotel while construction was underway, including work to renovate a kitchen and optimize a bathroom for wheelchair accessibility for visitors. (A representative of RISD said it was difficult to calculate the budget for renovations because of the many modes of contribution to the project.)

Among the furnishings and artworks, some were donated in prior administrations, some are recent gifts to the school, some are on loan and some were purchased by Williams. She will leave behind several of those acquisitions, such as light fixtures, as gifts to RISD when she eventually moves away.

To help the décor cohere, “teal is a color that I’ve tried to weave through,” Williams said. In the entry vestibule, illuminated by petals of leaded glass, glossy teal paint engulfs the walls and ceiling. The hue, in gradations from aqua to sapphire, recurs throughout the downstairs public rooms: in upholstery with geometric or splash patterns, and on wallpaper with auroras and undulations. Many of the furnishings and finishes were designed by RISD grads who have led major companies, including Mary Murphy (the textile creator Maharam), Rachel Cope (Calico Wallpaper) and Rachel Doriss (the textile company Pollack).

Williams described herself as “an incredible introvert,” yet determined to be a convivial host, circulating among guests snug in velvety sofas and chairs. In selecting the textiles, she said, “I love texture, and I want it to feel good, not raspy.” Her parties sometimes spill out onto the grounds; in summer, she said, “the hydrangeas are bonkers.”

Luxury furnishings donated to RISD blend seamlessly with her bargain backless Wayfair and CB2 seats, upgraded with high-end upholstery fabrics. The library’s wire snarl chandelier, from Design Within Reach, holds its own against ceiling fixtures full of snaking branches and glass teardrops by RISD alumni David Wiseman, Lindsey Adelman and Tracy Glover. Among Williams’ own art treasures are Siena Smith’s woven portraits of a little girl in white, Richard Haining Jr.’s bulbous vessel made from bits of reclaimed wood, and Todd McGrain’s bust of a Black man carved from record albums.

She invites students to the house not only as guests but also as exhibition curators; a downstairs corridor, renamed the Bowen Project Space, and a second-floor aerie, rechristened the Bowen Suite Gallery, are now dedicated to student art. For any visitors on financial aid, or anyone else unaccustomed to roaming palatial rooms, Williams said, “It can be superintimidating, coming to a house like this.”

To combat that intimidation factor, in lieu of formal seated meals, food is sometimes served buffet-style on a long white quartz counter along a windowed wall. Students are encouraged to fill their plates and sit anywhere, even on the grand zigzagging staircase. Some have told Williams that they disapprove of how she hung the artworks, which she takes as a sign of successful outreach.

“They feel very comfortable when they come into the house,” she said.

Alongside the quartz counter are some family photos. A native of Detroit, Williams was sent into foster care as an infant and taken in by Richard Williams, a Black pianist and foundry worker, and his wife, Marilyn Williams, a white school psychologist. To formally adopt the baby, “they had to fight, they had to pull every lever they could pull,” Williams said. Caseworkers finally concluded that “there was so much love in that house, it would be a crime to take me away.”

Her mother, who had bottomless curiosity, drove a gray van for summer outings as far afield as Mount Rushmore. During visits to Richard Williams’ native Alabama, he fended off racists’ potentially violent reactions to his mixed-race family by pretending to be the chauffeur, with his wife hiding Crystal in the back.

He died when Crystal was a preteen. Marilyn Williams spent years living in Spain with her, and then by herself in Japan (she died in 2000, at 63).

RISD’s president displays her parents’ portraits alongside a snapshot of herself as a toddler wearing her father’s tan ankle boots.

She has kept few other traces of her childhood homes through many cross-country moves. While writing and publishing poetry and prose, she has studied and worked at institutions from Oregon (Reed College) to Illinois (Columbia College Chicago), Manhattan (New York University) and Maine (Bates College). She owns some of her father’s sheet music and her mother’s massive wooden chests of drawers from Japan. Yes, Williams heads a school that has shaped makers since the 1870s, but, she said, “I don’t imbue a lot of sentiment in things.”

To reach her rooms on the RISD house’s second and third floors, she skirts around signs forbidding trespassing. (She has foiled the plans of guests overheard plotting to sneak upstairs: “I don’t think so. This is my house.”) Amid the palette of taupe, greige and raisin, nary a tchotchke is in sight, just a golden bird figurine by David Wiseman — she petted it in passing — and sculptor Lisa Sacco’s globule of glass draped over a metal slab. The family photos include a portrait of Oliver, her black standard poodle who died in 2009. “His big trick was looking at me,” she said. (She longs to bring home one of his brethren someday.)

The private suite “feels like a really beautiful hotel space,” Williams said. “I just want it to be calm. I can’t harbor visual busyness.”

After work, she decompresses by watching murder mysteries or decamping to her pre-RISD condo in Boston; her college president friends have strongly recommended maintaining the respite of a second home.

On the RISD premises, Williams said, staff are around even during downtime, and student protesters have rung the doorbell. “In some ways, there is no privacy,” Williams said. Nor has she found time for creative writing: “Poetry requires a kind of heart space and solitude that I don’t have.” But she also made it very clear that she was in no way complaining.

For the public rooms, she said, “There are still glaring omissions that I hope to resolve.” She wants to better represent, for instance, RISD’s accomplishments in the realms of glassmaking, floor coverings and silhouettes; Kara Walker is an alumna.

As the décor keeps evolving, the president said, “This house deserves to be used. Its bones are profoundly solid, and gorgeous.”