An Architect's Dream

Plas Brondanw is typical of the houses lived in by the Welsh gentry in the seventeenth century. It is the ancestral home of the Williams-Ellis family of Glasfryn but we know it today as the home of eccentric architect Clough Williams-Ellis, who lived here for 70 years until 1978.

The location of Plas Brondanw is spectacular, on the edge of Snowdonia National Park, with views to the mountains all around. The soil is acidic and the climate mild and damp “We just grow whatever seems most eager to oblige with the least trouble to ourselves.”

Views define the gardens. To the North rises the triangular peak of Cnicht, the Welsh Matterhorn, with Snowdon beyond. The main axis of the garden is a terrace along the Garden Front of the house which leads your eye inexorably to the beautiful mountains of Snowdonia.

Plas Brondanw is an architect’s garden. From the 1900s, Clough Williams-Ellis' busy architectural practice designed everything from cottages to new towns,  "Georgian, vernacular, baroque, modernistic and ad hoc styles  spring from his brain in never-ending succession.”*

The gardens at Plas Brondanw are linear and compartmented. Topiary, walls and lines of yew and box hedging divide and organise the space. Fruit trees and flowers provide ornament to the structure. Of all seasons, winter best exposes the garden’s strong bones. 

In 1915, Clough Williams Ellis married the writer Amabel Strachey. After distinguished service in the First World War, his fellow officers offered a silver salver as a wedding present. He preferred a folly. This gift became Pentwr, an early feature in the woodland garden.

The garden at Plas Brondanw pivots around a huge mature Holm Oak at the centre of the main lawn. An Italianate bridge supports an oval terrace,  a viewing platform looking to the peak of Moel Ddu to the West. Plants soften the formality: valerian, alchemilla and erigeron.

Vistas and walks lead to eyecatchers; statues, urns and columns. Roman emperors are favourites, Marcus Aurelius and Octavian are here framed in niches, but the Anglo-Welsh Jacobean architect Inigo Jones, who introduced Britain to Palladianism, features elsewhere.

Today, Clough Williams-Ellis is remembered primarily for the whimsical Italianate holiday village of Portmeirion, four miles away, built from 1925 to 1976 to share a love of architecture and to show that buildings can enhance the beauty of their environment. 

Portmeirion village provided an opportunity to rescue and reuse key parts of historic buildings and the same instinct is at work at Plas Brondanw. In the South pool stands an Ionic column, possibly Roman, rescued at the 1932 demolition of neo-classical Hooton Hall in Cheshire.

All his life, Clough Williams-Ellis was an active campaigner for the preservation of buildings and the countryside. in 1928, he wrote England and the Octopus, a polemic calling for town and country planning, and co-founded the Council for the Protection of Rural Wales.

From the gable of the house, a turquoise eagle flies. Gates, in striking turquoise and mustard, feature singing mermaids, draped ropes and stars. In the woods, a tented gazebo is really corrugated iron. The garden ends at The Full Stop, a pool in a walled circle of azaleas.

Fire damaged the house in 1951 and Clough Williams-Ellis faithfully restored it. A flaming urn forms a memorial in the Quarry Garden, while a cherub fountain on the Terrace is a tiny fireman. St Florian, patron saint of firefighters, tops a column.

Clough Williams-Ellis worked on his garden at Plas Brondanw all his long life, celebrating his Diamond wedding anniversary there in 1975 “It is warming indeed to see the avenues that I then planted growing so flourishingly and the whole place maturing in ever increasing beauty"

Plas Brondanw’s head gardener is Kimberley Davison, who finds herself tending not just plants but the legacy of a great 20th century architect in the place he most loved.  She works to Clough Williams-Ellis’ motto “Cherish the past; adorn the present; build for the future."