Portmeirion is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. The architect Clough Williams-Ellis spent the early 1920s searching for an ideal site – a bay or an island, at home or abroad – on which to build his perfect holiday village. In the end he found it, just five miles from his old family home, Plas Brondanw, in north Wales. The bones of the place lay in a little harbour on a rundown estate owned by his uncle. An experiment which had all the makings of a fairytale in the telling but verged on the nightmarish at times in terms of complexity and costs began with the conversion of a Victorian house and a couple of cottages into a modest hotel. The Midland Bank loaned Williams-Ellis the money. Judging from his ‘Impression’ of his fantasy village in a woodblock poster from c. 1926, his vision for it was fully formed early on.
Williams-Ellis presented Portmeirion as if staged, replete with vistas and a succession of exuberant details, all set within a rocky Italianate enclave looking out over a huge estuary. The tides and shifting weather systems provided daily action. ‘I wanted to show that one could develop even a very beautiful site without defiling it,’ he wrote. His ideas echoed those of the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE), also founded in 1926.
Finalised as an assembly of fragments, follies and reconstituted wholes, the eventual village is enmeshed by its landscape, the shifting levels and snaking paths. It basks in the unexpected moments, those serendipitous effects that Williams-Ellis termed ‘eye-traps’ – tower or campanile, a dome, a sculpture, a reflection. Colour plays its part throughout, particularly a penetrating turquoise used sparingly throughout the village and the estate beyond.
In a newly published and richly illustrated volume on Portmeirion, Sarah Baylis traces the quirky tale of its construction. She celebrates local artisans who faced Williams-Ellis’s near-impossible demands, such as the reconstruction of a Jacobean banqueting hall transported from a house in Flintshire. Complete with its barrel-vaulted plaster ceiling depicting the labours of Hercules, it was re-erected within the Town Hall by a team of stonemasons (nearby Porthmadog was developed around the slate industry). Many of these men worked at Portmeirion all their lives, testament to Williams-Ellis’s approach and his compelling project. The outcome was not for the architectural purist, let alone the dogged modernist. Baylis’s achievement is to capture it all, people, place, architecture and design, conveying both the sense of magic and of risk.
Williams-Ellis, who lived into his mid-nineties, straddled many streams of life and thought. For her part his wife, Amabel, was a writer, critic and translator, and mother to their three children. As a member of the left-leaning intellectual Strachey family, she had close ties to Bloomsbury circles (Lytton Strachey was her cousin). The couple toured Soviet Russia in 1931, admiring the modernist social architecture of housing, health and education, so central in the new order. Amabel and Williams-Ellis had met when he won a competition in 1914 for ‘the 100-guinea cottage’, organised by the Spectator (her father was editor, and Amabel herself would later have a brief spell as literary editor). Williams-Ellis advocated for materials such as cob and pisé, ideal for agricultural cottages and the much-vaunted, scarcely delivered ‘Homes for Heroes’.
Williams-Ellis always nurtured the picturesque, if contentious, idea that Portmeirion might become ‘a home for fallen buildings’. In 1959 Nikolaus Pevsner wrote to him, wondering if he might take on an abandoned pavilion, the Music Room at Earsham Hall in Norfolk. It was a vulnerable fragment of a building designed by John Soane early in his career. But the Music Room and its elaborate ceiling was already listed, so it never made the journey to Wales. The Hercules room from Emral Hall in Flintshire remains one of a kind.
As an ardent conservationist, of both landscapes and buildings, Williams-Ellis was caught up in the work of the CPRE and CPRW from the start. His vision was wide but also practical. He knew how to attract notice, on the page as in person, sporting canary-yellow knee socks and breeches. With his campaigning book titles, England and the Octopus (1928) and Britain and the Beast (1937), he wore his heart on their sleeves.
Portmeirion was (and is) irresistibly seductive. The hotel attracted swathes of smart and fashionable people, and the collection of buildings gave it a delicious unpredictability. Williams-Ellis’s own favourite, added in 1965, was a villa named the Unicorn – as Baylis writes, ‘no more than a bungalow built on a steep slope’. By his sleight of hand, and pilasters and pediment, it assumed the witty grandeur, if not the scale, of a classical country house. When the television series The Prisoner was filmed there between 1966 and ’68, the setting was initially a ‘secret location’. The joke was, of course, that Portmeirion must be the most polychromatic village in Wales – but since most viewers in the UK experienced the broadcast in black and white, it wasn’t so easily recognisable. The Prisoner engraved the image of Portmeirion on the nation and the enduring success of the hotel and village as a tourist destination owes much to the cult series.
Williams-Ellis indulged in architectural salmagundi, as Soane did when he petulantly attached remnants of Westminster Hall – where he considered he had been professionally mistreated – to the front of his own house. More cheerfully, Williams-Ellis pursued a pair of ‘eroded but authentic’ urns from St. Paul’s Cathedral, for which he had the ideal situation. He had already accommodated a stretch of crenelated parapet from Westminster Abbey but considered St. Paul’s ‘far more my cup of tea’. He desperately hoped for a ‘Wren memento… my finishing touch.’ But in the end it was not to be.
When I compiled the county-by-county gazetteer to my book Villages of Vision, a survey of idealised planned villages in Britain and Ireland, Portmeirion was one of only two holiday resorts included, the second being Thorpeness, near Aldeburgh in Suffolk. One of Thorpeness’s most memorable buildings, the House in the Clouds (1923), teeters above the gorse as if on a stalk, ingeniously combining a large water tank and an idiosyncratic cottage. What the developers of the two resorts have in common is that they took frivolity in design seriously. When in the 1960s the French architect and urban planner François Spoerry designed a resort village in the south of France, it was in tribute to Portmeirion. But that key ingredient, frivolity, was missing. Though pretty, Port Grimaud lacks the qualities that make Portmeirion a confection in its own league: the rough edges, the surprises, the magic.
Portmeirion: The Architecture of Pleasure, by Sarah Baylis, is published by Yale University Press.
