In the beautiful gardens at Plas Brondanw, one feature has special significance. Terminating an avenue of chestnuts is a flaming urn that, as the carved dedication below states, was ‘raised on the ashes of their home by Clough and Amabel Williams-Ellis’ to mark the end of the rebuilding campaign on December 10, 1953, and commemorate the seven local masons and craftsmen to whom restoration was due.
Exactly two years earlier, the couple had awoken to the smell of smoke. Clough found the ground-floor library ablaze and his beloved terrier, Pennant, lying dead on the threshold. The telephone cable was already burnt through and Clough was lucky to escape after the floor gave way beneath him. A messenger ran to the village summoning five fire brigades, but a winter gale fanned the flames until little more than the 3ft thick walls survived. Press reports described the usually dapper architect of Portmeirion, now 68 years old, his face, feet and one hand bandaged, ‘wearing his wife’s spectacles and borrowed clothes,’ resolute that: ‘My house will rise again.’
Fig 2: The low range at the rear is the oldest part of the building and still retains the late-Tudor fireplace of the original farmhouse.
Williams-Ellis had inherited the Brondanw estate in Gwynedd in 1908, aged 25. As a child, his mother had taught him to appreciate the simple Welsh cottages she liked to sketch and the combined dynastic responsibility and romantic setting of the Williams manor house in the shadow of Snowdon immediately inflamed his antiquarian tendencies. It was some 50 years since Williams-Ellis’s grandfather had left the house on succeeding to Glasfryn in Caernarfonshire. Tenants from the local slate quarries had moved in and, by the early 1900s, seven families inhabited the building.
This period of familial absence neatly coincided with most of the Victorian era, the architectural output of which Williams-Ellis roundly despised. Having, as he put it in his autobiography, ‘never been deflowered by restoration or improvement’, Brondanw was ripe for sympathetic conservation and every spare penny he earnt from clients was channelled towards its gradual resurrection.
Built into the slope of the hillside, the oldest part is the two-storey late-Tudor entrance range (Fig 2). This survived the 1951 fire and maintains its large farmhouse hearth under an impressively wide, but shallow arch of slate. In the 17th century, a grander four-storey cross-wing had been added overlooking the tidal estuary of the Afon Glaslyn, an area subsequently reclaimed by William Madocks for farmland and the building of Porthmadog on the coast. A slate plaque set into the south-west end of Plas Brondanw records the initial and date ‘W. 1660’.
Despite their divergent scale, the two building phases sit harmoniously together within the wider landscape, accessed from an 18th-century forecourt and linked by what Christopher Hussey, in a 1931 Country Life article, called the ‘plentiful slabby stone, blue and purple and brown, that inspired most of [Williams-Ellis’s] operations here’.
Fig 3: The piers and ironwork of this garden gate frame a distant view of Moel Ddu. Williams-Ellis’s trademark turquoise is found in both the garden and inside the house.
The architect’s first building projects at the house were a sturdy gate lodge with fairytale-castle qualities and a rather French-looking orangery that set oeil-de-boeuf win- dows in the local rough stone, both of 1912–14. This external work was partly due to the ongoing tenancies; Williams-Ellis’s own space in the house was initially limited to the lower ground-floor brewhouse vacated by the hasty departure of a notorious salmon poacher. As the second son, inheriting the second estate, Williams-Ellis also lacked money for grand gestures.
Evidence that he did speculate on the possibilities for more ambitious changes comes from a Capriccio for Rebuilding Plas Brondanw, now in the RIBA drawings collection. Here, the vernacular original has largely disappeared in a perspective view that features a Classical pediment over the garden front and polygonal bay windows rising through three floors of the gable end. The 15th-century range has been raised by two storeys and become an infill with a new gabled tower behind it linked to a second cross wing. Certain elements foreshadow nearby Portmeirion, perhaps his most famous creation (Country Life, January 7), but there is also something of the Cambridge colleges Williams-Ellis knew from his brief spell as an undergraduate. The 1913 date is significant, for this was the year he met his future wife, Amabel Strachey.
Fig 4: The Venetian win-dow in the first-floor drawing room was added after the fire, but the use of salvaged oak pilasters to frame it gives an appropriately antiquarian feel. The vitrines to either side of the window contain pottery by Susan Williams-Ellis, founder of the Portmeirion Pottery.
Keen to demonstrate his suitability as a potential husband, Williams-Ellis had the bravado to exhibit his dream at the Royal Academy, picturing himself next to a veiled woman in the foreground, plans spread out before them. As it turned out, the house was already perfect for his bride-to-be. Amabel later confessed that: ‘It was a good thing that I’d promised to marry Clough before I saw Brondanw, otherwise I could never have been sure it hadn’t been for love of Brondanw, rather than any fancy I had for him, that had made me say yes.’ Immediately after the couple’s Surrey wedding in July 1915, they boarded a train to their Welsh home. As a wedding present from his fellow officers in the Welsh Guards, Williams-Ellis requested a folly. Baffled, they obliged (Fig 1).
After the war, garden improvements continued as the house returned to a single dwelling. Williams-Ellis’s growing architectural practice, the demands of three children and his wife’s work as an author and journalist meant, however, that the family lived mostly in the capital, settling at Romney’s House, Hampstead in 1930 and letting Plas Brondanw to friends. In 1937, Williams-Ellis solved the problem of a bulging west wall in characteristically stylish fashion, adding a belvedere tower that acts as a buttress as well as simultaneously enhancing views from, and of, the house (Fig 5). At its base, arches on three sides span the lower terrace, creating exactly that sensation of a little tunnel Williams-Ellis particularly enjoyed.
Fig 5: The garden falls away sharply below the house. The garden front is defined by its belvedere tower, visible to the far right of this view. It spans the lower terrace and provides three-sided views across the landscape from every floor.
When war came again, the family left London for the safety of rural Wales. It was the first time they had permanently inhabited Plas Brondanw and, although they shared it with a string of evacuees, they came to know it more profoundly and, in Clough’s case, to see its faults. In some ways then, the fire presented an opportunity to improve and modernise the interior.
The difficulties were considerable in an era of building licences and continued rationing, but few architects were better trained in using salvage than Williams-Ellis, who kept a store of historic parts at Portmeirion. To reinstate the burnt-out floors, he opted for fire-resistant concrete covered with oak parquet. Unable to source the required steel joists, he scoured redundant slate quarries on the Brondanw estate and repurposed old tramway rails to do the job. Roof timbers and slates came from an old school nearby; 18th-century doors and fire surrounds arrived from a London dealer. The biggest change to the interior was on the attic floor, which became a self-contained flat accessed from the steeply rising ground at the rear via a playful route across a stone arched bridge, roof terrace and loggia.
On the ground and first floors, Williams-Ellis skilfully manipulated sightlines, borrowing light and creating vistas into the landscape that lend a feeling of grandeur to what is really a compact and intimate interior. With barely three bedrooms and three main reception rooms, the connecting spaces are all the more important. In the entrance hall, two short staircases re-use four different designs of timber balusters, a suitably quirky introduction to a house where decorative features from across the eras mix with ease.
Fig 6: The ground-floor library was Williams-Ellis’s studio and sanctuary. As are most of the fittings in the house, the door and fireplace are Georgian features re-used from elsewhere. The architect enthusiastically recycled materials from old buildings.
One stair descends to the ancient brewhouse, the other leads up to a room in the buttress tower, where windows on three sides frame shifting views of the near garden and far mountains. The neighbouring library (Fig 6) was Williams-Ellis’s studio until his death in 1978. He worked here into his eighties, standing at his drawing board, surrounded by books and a cosy jumble of sofas, armchairs and sidetables. A Classical fireplace speaks to his love of the Georgian style, as do the four fluted pilasters on the gable wall that add status to an otherwise ordinary sash window. Such is the depth of the window reveal that Williams-Ellis used it to conceal extra bookshelves.
Today, Plas Brondanw is open to the public, showcasing the work of the family’s eldest daughter, Susan Williams-Ellis, artist and founder of Portmeirion Pottery. The library curtains are made from her mid-century textile designs and displays of her ceramics and works on paper rotate alongside exhibitions by contemporary artists. Although it is now a gallery, Brondanw retains the informality of a lived-in space, thanks to a combination of curatorial sensitivity and the strength of Williams-Ellis’s architectural personality. His unique stamp is everywhere. In the Tudor kitchen that became the dining room and eventually Amabel’s bedroom, it is most visible in the stepped alcove that juxtaposes a large window with elegant fanlight against the room’s low, beamed ceiling. Set into the green terrazzo floor is a grey marble circle that began life as a tabletop made for Penrhyn Castle.
Fig 7: At the top of the landing, a strip of chequerboard flooring leads to the drawing room.
At the heart of the redesigned home are the staircase hall and upper landing, defined by curves and round-headed arches. Together, they provide a generous, clean space that seems to sit effortlessly within the historic structure. Key to this more open arrangement was the replacement of the original dark oak stair treads with slate, the lower steps arcing round to meet the worn slate of the surviving hall floor (Fig 8).
Reversing the stairs allowed for construction of a new ground-floor cloakroom with an access tunnel that is vintage Williams-Ellis, teasing out the architectural pleasure from a small and functional space. The short passageway has a barrel ceiling, its floor is laid with chequerboard black and white marble, borrowed light coming from a round-headed peep hole in the wall. At the top of the stairs (Fig 7), the bespoke iron balustrade employs a repeat pattern of interlocking ovals with rounded tops and bottoms, the sections separated by uprights that mimic the pair of fluted oak pilasters framing the entrance to the landing. Painted in turquoise and gold, the ironwork matches the iron gates (Fig 3) and garden features visible outside.
The first-floor drawing room opens off another strip of chequerboard marble that runs across the landing to its door, an architectural reminiscence, perhaps, of the picture gallery at Romney’s House Williams-Ellis laid with black and white squares for his studio. As a decorative device, it cleverly establishes a hierarchy of space, marking out the public drawing room from the private bedrooms, dressing room and bathroom. Post-fire, a new Venetian window gave the drawing room greater external emphasis. That it was also a bit of Classical pomp is clear from the flaming plaster urns over the two side windows, the whole internal window nook outlined by fluted oak pilasters with gilded Corinthian capitals (Fig 4).
Fig 8: Curves and arches in the rebuilt staircase hall make this central space feel light and open. After the 1951 fire, the oak treads were replaced in slate.
The use of salvage elsewhere on the first floor was more utilitarian. In the dressing room, surplus doors became a high shelf with a hanging rail fitted to the underside for clothes storage. Structural decoration in the main bedroom was minimal. When one realises that the angle of the window splay on the north-east wall allowed Williams-Ellis to view the peak of Snowdon from his bed it becomes clear that nothing else was really necessary.
For its response to and ongoing conversation with the landscape, Plas Brondanw is a special and beautiful place. The spirit of Williams-Ellis and his love for this corner of north Wales is as alive here as it is in nearby Portmeirion, more subtle certainly, but every bit as delightful.
With special thanks to Rachel Hunt.
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This feature originally appeared in the June 24, 2026, print edition of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.