Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis, a self-taught Welsh architect, began the lifelong project of building Portmeirion in 1925... [more]
The 1965 Gloriette is named after a similar folly at a Viennese palace. Clough salvaged its Ionic columns from a Palladian mansion that had been demolished.
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A Rare Bit of Wales Portmeirion
by Jan Morris, Alwyn W. Turner, Mark Eastment, Stephen Lacey and Robin Llywelyn
Antique Collectors’ Club, Easthampton, MA; 2006
240 pp.; 400 color and b&w illus.; $49.50
ISBN 1-85149-522-3
Reviewed by Eve M. Kahn
Foes of New Urbanism often argue that the movement produces unlived-in resorts – part-time enclaves for the wealthy. Of course, in a just world the developments’ housing would mostly be affordable. In imperfect reality, there is some comfort to be taken in knowing that the public can access New Urbanist walkable streets of varied architecture and mini-parks, and maybe sometimes stay at the cheaper rentals.
The most alluring New Urbanist communities built so far – including Seaside, Rosemary Beach and Palmetto Bluff – have a little-known Welsh cousin, a coastal village called Portmeirion. Bertram Clough Williams-Ellis (who liked to be called Clough), a self-taught Welsh architect, bought the peninsula in 1925, set up hotels and other tourist draws there and kept building more until his death in 1978 at age 95. His descendants now run it as a charitable trust, drawing a quarter-of-a-million visitors a year (see www.portmeirion-village.com). Seaside and its ilk will be fortunate to age as well as Portmeirion, and to be the subjects of handsome, riveting monographs like the Antique Collectors’ Club book Portmeirion.
The six authors include eminent travel writer Jan Morris (she knew Clough for 40 years) and Robin Llywelyn, Clough’s grandson and Portmeirion’s managing director. The loving essays chronicle the village’s growth and vividly evoke the tourist experience. In a chapter called “Clough’s Shangri-La,” Morris writes: “We pass beneath a sort of Gothic gatehouse, past a kind of gnome-like village green, beneath a variety of Baroque houses, alongside a Regency-looking colonnade, beside some white-washed Cotswoldian cottages, with, yes, a distinctly Portofino-type campanile on a hillock … past what seems to be a Jacobean town hall … until we are debouched at the door of a white Welsh country house beside the golden sands of the estuary.”
Clough was a well-rooted multiculturalist: he claimed descent from a 12th-century Welsh king, Gruffydd ap Cynan. Clough had virtually no formal architectural training except for a three-month stint at London’s Architectural Association, but he had wit, charisma and an unforgettable retro presence. “He wore long yellow stockings with breeches, flamboyant waistcoats, bright bow ties,” Morris recalls. Clough’s bemused, tolerant wife, a blueblood named Amabel Strachey, described him as “an extrovert, a gregarious, amusing, stimulating fellow … expert at making cruel fun of the pompous and the insensitive, and not caring whom he annoyed.”
In a seven-decade career, Clough designed tradition-steeped public buildings and residences around Britain. When he was knighted at age 89, he ranked as the country’s oldest practicing architect. But only at Portmeirion could he play client and let loose.
When Clough bought the site from an uncle, the only standing buildings were a Victorian villa and stables, a fisherman’s cottage and a gardener’s bothy. Monkey-puzzle trees, Scots pines and weeping silver limes had overgrown into jungles. One eccentric previous owner, Adelaide Haigh, hated to prune for fear of hurting plant tissue. Like her, Clough was an adamant preservationist and environmentalist – in a lifelong stream of lectures and books, he criticized “the soulless disfigurement” of the English countryside. He advocated construction of more national parks, playgrounds, bike trails and wind farms, as well as enforcement of landmarks protections and billboard bans. He knew, though, that politicians and developers would only listen to him if he could prove his ideas made money. At Portmeirion, Morris writes, Clough set out to create a showplace, “which would in no way harm its environment … would not wreck the landscape, would not weaken the Welshness of its society, would encourage a love of beauty among its visitors and might encourage commercial developers to temper their profits with sympathy for local concerns.”
Early ads for Portmeirion touted its “sub-tropical gardens, wide sands, miles of private walks along indented coast” and “gaily colour-washed buildings on the little quay.” Literati and other celebrities took the bait: Noel Coward, Bertrand Russell, Ingrid Bergman and assorted royals including King Zog of Albania. Movies and TV series were filmed there, most famously the Kafka-esque British show The Prisoner, in which Patrick McGoohan plays a hostage inexplicably held by nameless government forces. The late-1960s series ended without revealing the captive’s fate, and it also puzzled some viewers because Portmeirion seemed like such a nice hideaway. “I remember being mystified by why someone would want to escape from such a charming looking place,” writes the rock musician Jools Holland in this volume’s foreword.
Clough incorporated ever more curiosities into the Portmeirion streetscape to entertain visitors returning annually to the two hotels and dozen guest cottages. He dabbled in Art Deco, adding curvilinear bays with water views. In 1960, he decided that the skyline suffered from “dome deficiency,” and built a domed octagonal Pantheon – at age 80, he gilded the roof himself. And he “Cloughed-up” existing buildings with architectural salvage. “A home for fallen buildings,” he called Portmeirion, while recycling 18th-century stone colonnades or 19th-century metal railings with filigree mermaids.
His staff gardeners meanwhile planted swaths of exotica, which thrives at Portmeirion thanks to Gulf Stream currents. Stephen Lacey, a garden writer for the Daily Telegraph, devotes a chapter to neat topiary or romantic groves, studded with urns and Classical or Chinoiserie pavilions. The plant names alone are worth this book’s cover price: candelabra primulas, white-flowered eucryphias, New Zealand griselinia, tussock grasses and native nuphars.
A few academics, the authors point out, have somehow managed to resist Portmeirion’s charms. “Ridiculous Welsh fantasy,” they have sniffed, or called it “out of scale” or even “terrifying.” But by the late 1960s, Clough had been rediscovered as a proto-Postmodernist. In 1971, the whole site, including his newest follies, was landmarked at Grade II.
Portmeirion celebrated its 80th birthday last fall by unveiling a new quatrefoil-filigree gazebo. Tourists come for the ebullient architecture and plants, or perhaps the souvenir shop dedicated to memorabilia from The Prisoner. No one seems to mind that hardly anyone lives on site. Clough tried and failed to set up industries (boatbuilding, woodworking) for off-season employment, but realized that the remote village would never be a model for housing the masses. Instead, it could help educate architects, planners and their clients about the need for designs that, Clough wrote, “create warmth and human interest.” His longtime professional motto: “More fun for more people.”
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