Atlanta architect leaves legacy of beautiful buildings, friends

Henry Howard Smith II restored The Hermitage.

Some of Atlanta’s most attractive architecture can be attributed to Henry Howard Smith II.

Smith, who followed his father, the esteemed Francis Palmer Smith into a career in architecture, was hired in the early 1990s to design a cloister for the historic Saint Luke’s Episcopal Church in on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta. Expectations were high. P. Thorton Mayre, arguably best known for designing the grand Fox Theatre, had been the architect when the Civil War-era church moved to Peachtree Street in 1906.

But the cloister “was so beautifully done, most newcomers assume it was part” of Mayre’s original design, said Robert L. Mays, a retired SunTrust executive and current chairman of Saint Luke’s property committee.

Henry Howard Smith II, a second-generation architect who designed churches, commercial buildings and custom homes for the Atlanta elite in a decades-long career, died peacefully Jan. 23.

He was born Nov. 3, 1927 to Ella Sorin Smith and Francis Palmer Smith, a highly regarded architect and the first dean of the School of Architecture at Georgia Tech.

Henry was a graduate of Druid Hills High School and received his degree in architecture from his father’s alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. During Henry’s college years, which overlapped wartime, the Smith family spent summers at their beach house on St. Simons and he would work at the Brunswick shipyards.

“He was there when they found one of the rafts that the German spies had landed on St. Simons,” recalled Alana Shepherd, co-founder of Atlanta’s Shepherd Center and Smith’s friend for more than half of a century.

Henry married Anne Irwin, his high school sweetheart and wife of 66 years, in August 1950. The next year, he enlisted in the United States Air Force, working with the Atomic Energy Program.

Returning to Atlanta in 1953, he went to work in his father’s architectural firm, designing and renovating an array of churches, banks, college buildings and medical facilities, as well as custom homes in Atlanta and along the Georgia coast.

Smith considered one of his most satisfying projects the restoration of The Hermitage, President Andrew Jackson’s home outside Nashville. He was hired to help return The Hermitage to its original beauty and recalled for friends how on a walkthrough of the home he was told the current wall colors matched those in Jackson’s day.

“He took out his pocket knife, scraped down and said: ‘Wrong. This is the original color,’” Shepherd said.

Smith also discovered a pistol in the rafters of the home that likely belonged to Jackson, she said.

Shepherd and her husband had Smith design several homes, as well as an office in the Shepherd hospital building.

Builders weren’t always eager to bid on work on a house designed by Smith. He was so meticulous.

“He was an old school architect” and would develop a book of specifications that was an inch-thick and likely intimidating, Shepherd said.

Father and son partnered on a number of projects, even though their styles were different. Francis was very much a traditionalist, while Henry was more into the modern design that was being taught when he entered college, said Robert M. Craig, dean emeritus of Georgia Tech’s School of Design and author of a work on Henry’s father.

Henry “had the benefit of his father’s skill as a traditionalist” and was able to incorporate either style, depending on what the project required, he said.

Henry took great pride in his father’s work and has been recognized for his efforts to preserve it, Craig said.

On the personal side, Smith enjoyed “very caustic remarks and being a little contrary,” Shepherd said.

He once joined an Optimist Club and was declared its most pessimistic member, she said.

“He was quite a character and a longtime friend,” Shepherd said.

Daughter Ella Smith Tyler remembers fondly the times the family spent at a later vacation home on Lake Allatoona. Smith would patiently devote hours to teaching her and all of her friends to water ski, she said.

Father and daughter also spent hours playing backgammon and chess, and crossword puzzles were part of Smith’s daily routine, she said.

Henry Smith was “a true Atlantan to the core, a Southern gentleman, a product of Druid Hills and a Buckhead Boy before there was such a thing,” said son-in-law David C. Tyler.

Smith displayed good manners, a collegial nature and mischief all at the same time, his son-in-law said.

He was known for pulling gags on his children’s friends who were headed for a visit at the family’s beach cottage on St. Simons.

He’d direct them to a small, rundown house on a lonely two-lane road in the middle of South Georgia and say: “This is it, unpack your bags.”

Smith had nicknames for many of his family and friends, and it was clear “the more he kidded you, the more he loved you,” Tyler said.

“Henry Smith — there will never be another,” daughter Ella said. “But his legacy is visible and endures in the landscape in which we live and in our hearts.”

Smith’s mother died when he was 3, and his father died in 1971.

He is survived by his wife, Anne Irwin Smith; daughters Alice Anne McIntyre of Jonesboro and Ella Smith Tyler of Atlanta; son Henry Howard Smith III of Atlanta; and several grandchildren.

Henry Howard Smith II