Harry Bates was born on April 27, 1927, in Lake City, Fla., the second of two children of Thomas Henry Bates, a country doctor, and Mamie Fairfax Dunstan Bates. Planning to enter his father’s profession, Harry studied bacteriology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill before changing his mind and transferring to the North Carolina State University College of Design, in Raleigh.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in architecture in 1952, he went to work for a Raleigh firm. But as he wrote in the magazine Hamptons Cottages & Gardens in 2016, by 1955 he realized that if he stayed in Raleigh, “I’d probably be doing the same thing 20 years down the line.” So he took a job at the New York office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he worked on the plans for three now-renowned midcentury structures — One Chase Manhattan Plaza, in the financial district, and the Pepsi-Cola and Union Carbide Buildings on Park Avenue.
“The 10 years I spent with Skidmore taught me discipline,” he told Sports Illustrated for an article about him in 1970. “What was really exciting was that in the last couple of years I was there, the firm began to discard and pare down. Lots of superfluous detail disappeared from their plans, frills were gone, and they began to cut through to the design essentials.”
While at the Skidmore firm, he moonlighted designing beach houses that reflected the same self-discipline. But they functioned beautifully.
“Bates houses require a minimum of maintenance,” Sports Illustrated wrote. “Everything works: doors are solid, windows fit, and there are no drafts. Outside showers keep sand out of the house, and, if it does get tracked in, it doesn’t show on the bleached floors. There is plenty of storage space and a lot of built-ins so that nobody needs to drag out all sorts of furniture from town.”
Yet the houses were refined enough to satisfy friends like the actress Betty Grable, who visited Mr. Bates in the Pines, and to appear repeatedly in magazines like House Beautiful and Architectural Record. He attracted clients like the philanthropist Jeanette Edris Rockefeller, whose husband, Winthrop Rockefeller, was later governor of Arkansas; Mr. Bates designed a two-box house for her in Fire Island Pines in 1964, named Dual in the Sun.
