Mark Girouard

Mark Girouard FSA (7 October 1931 – 16 August 2022) was a British architectural historian. He was an authority on the country house, and Elizabethan and Victorian architecture.

Girouard was born in Marylebone, London on 7 October 1931. He was educated at Ampleforth College, read classics at Christ Church, Oxford, and then worked for the magazine Country Life from about 1958 until 1967, firstly as a writer on architecture and then, from 1964, as its architectural editor. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art from 1975 to 1976 and elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1987. Girouard was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2011. He was on the board of trustees of The Architecture Foundation from 1992 to 1999 and a founder, and the first chairman, of the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust. He was the grandson of Henry Beresford, 6th Marquess of Waterford through his mother, Lady Blanche Girouard.

His Life in the English Country House won the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize for 1978, and the WH Smith Literary Award in 1979.

National Life Stories conducted an oral history interview (C467/92) with Girouard in 2009 for its Architects Lives' collection held by the British Library.

Photographs by Girouard are held in the Conway Library of Art and Architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, and are currently being digitised.

In 1970, Girouard married to the artist Dorothy Dorf (born 1942) and they lived in Notting Hill Gate, London. They had one daughter, the writer Blanche Girouard. The couple separated in the 1990s, but never divorced.

Girouard died from heart failure at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington, London, on 16 August 2022, aged 90.

He wrote of his ancestral connection to Saul Solomon, a pioneer liberal politician and businessman in Cape Colony, and his wife Georgiana Solomon, a social activist and suffragette. Girouard was descended from Saul's brother Edward, born in 1820 in Saint Helena, who spent 18 years working with the Griquas and Basutos in South Africa for the London Missionary Society.