lucky block What Has 25 Rooms and Comes With the Job?

This article is part of our Design special section about creating space with the look and feel for one person.

“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, R.I. She moved in two years ago, upon becoming the 18th president of 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, 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,” she added. 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. Ms. Williams’s case is singular, however, in significant ways. She 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.

ImageMs. Williams, president of RISD, in her official residence in Providence, R.I.ImageAnother room in the home, featuring a piece from Megan Foster’s “Nite Brite” series.ImageThe 1890s mansion was donated to the school in the 1950s. Since becoming president, Ms. Williams has had it renovated to make sure the space “hangs together in a way that I would want it to hang together.”

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