June Holroyd obituary

My friend June Holroyd was an architect who, late in her career, established with her husband and elder son a Hispanic-Mediterranean style centred on Santa Barbara, California, having moved to the US with her family in the 1960s.

June, who has died aged 97, met Geoffrey Holroyd when they were both architecture students at Sheffield University, where she enrolled in 1944 – she was one of only three women in a class of 80.

Born in Sheffield, she was the eldest daughter of Charles Whitham, who ran the family steel business in the city, and his wife, Majorie (nee Beevers). June was educated at a convent and then at a Methodist school that had been evacuated to a large hotel on Bassenthwaite Lake in Cumberland (Cumbria) during the second world war.

She and Geoff married in 1950, and her first job was in the architect’s department of the London property agents Hillier, Parker, May and Rowden. From there she moved to Harrison, Barnes and Hubbard, helping to design a new university in Accra on the Gold Coast (now Ghana).

In 1952 Geoff was awarded a partial scholarship at Harvard, and June found she needed to earn some money while in the US. This led to a job with a Boston architectural firm building a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts – “designing rooms that you would expect to see in an abattoir”. The following year they moved to Chicago, where June worked for the planning office preparing schemes for slum clearance and rebuilding. In the city she met some architectural modernist masters including Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier.

After their return to Britain in 1954 Geoff helped to pioneer the Independent Group of artists and designers, who were instrumental in launching pop art. June meanwhile was looking after a young family and doing a major renovation – often by hand – of Spencer House, a late 17th-century mansion in Blackheath, south-east London. Her biggest commission at this period was the redesign of Lewisham town hall, juxtaposing a modernist glass and stainless-steel curtain wall with the existing neo-gothic building.

But June was restless, and when Geoffrey was offered a teaching sabbatical at the University of Albuquerque she moved the entire family in 1967 to New Mexico, and later to San Louis Obispo in California.

There she worked for the local county planning department, which, she was distressed to discover, had virtually no power over developers intent on replacing local Spanish-style adobe buildings with utilitarian concrete shopping centres.

Perhaps as a result of this experience, as well as her time in New Mexico, when the family moved to Santa Barbara in 1973 June became a champion of “pueblo building”, first restoring and remodelling a beautiful adobe house on the outskirts of the city. This project led to other local commissions through which she and Geoff helped develop a new style of architecture with a Hispanic-Mediterranean approach.

Working with her son Nils, a construction engineer, they launched a series of prestigious designs that became known as the “Holroyd houses”. Latterly they incorporated stained and leaded glass windows designed by her daughter, Tanya.

Geoff died in 2016. She is survived by her children, Sarah, Tanya, Nils and Sam, and nine grandchildren.