From
this stunningly beautiful corner of the country comes the finest, most elaborate,
imaginative and sustained piece of folly work in Great Britain - the village
of Portmeirion. The genius of one man built it; its worldwide fame will preserve
it.Sir Clough Williams-Ellis was the architect errant, as he described himself in his autobiography, and it was his dream and his vision that created this extraordinary fantasy town on the little peninsula between the estuaries of the Glaslyn and the Dwyryd. The dream had been with Sir Clough all his life, for initially he had wanted to buy an island on which he could express his architectural thoughts concretely. Unusually for a folly-builder commonsense prevailed, and when an uncle offered to sell him the Aberia peninsula he realised at once that this was the ideal site to build his ideas. This part of North Wales has its own micro-climate; we ourselves have sunbathed in Portmeirion in January with the temperature nudging the seventies, and as a result the estate when he bought it was already covered with exotic plants. With pure Welsh practicality the first thing Sir Clough did was to open the existing house as an hotel and invited influential friends to come and stay. The food, as he admitted, was terrible, but the natural beauty of the renamed Portmeirion peninsula captivated the guests so much that word quickly spread and the hotel became a fashionable success.
This enabled Sir Clough to embark seriously on an unprogrammed expansion, building the major features of the village such as the campanile and the dome quickly, like an artist delineating a scene with a few brush strokes before filling in the detail. From 1926 to the end of his long and fruitful life he added continuously to the village, his 'home for fallen buildings', as he called it. There are columns, a shell grotto (with a very low roof the top of which doubles as the Belvedere Outlook), arches, fountains, statues, paths, the Gloriette, steps, cottages, balconies, cobbles, gateways and every other imaginable form of explorable architecture. Colour too; not content with the grey washed Merioneth stone and slate Sir Clough picked a Mediterranean paint pot and poured its rainbow colours over the village. It is a jewel in a magnificent setting, a gem which was partly inspired by medieval Tuscan hill towns and partly by Portofino, as Sir Clough wrote:
- "How should I not have fallen for Portofino? Indeed its image remained with me as an almost perfect example of the man-made adornment and use of an exquisite site..."
Portmeirion
today is so much more than Portofino today. The very random variety of the
village is its own cohesiveness, whereas Portofino's undisputed beauty has
been masked by its obtrusive commercialism, the overpainted face of a beauty
long past her prime.
The new, expanded, fully revised and rewritten FOLLIES, GROTTOES AND GARDEN BUILDINGS by Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp, with photos on nearly every one of its 600 pages, is available from GREAT bookshops at £20 (ISBN 1-85410-625-2, published by Aurum Press, July 15 1999). Signed copies are available direct from the authors. Send a UK cheque for £23 (inc. p&p, UK only) made payable to "Gwyn Headley" to:
Folly Book Offer
22 Mount View Road
London N4 4HX