The hotel: Portmeirion is the supreme monument to British eccentricity:
a high-camp holiday village of Italianate buildings assembled by the
self-styled “architect and publican” Sir Clough Williams Ellis, painted in
zany colours and tattooed onto a remote headland overlooking Cardigan Bay.
When you clap eyes on the place, you might wonder if he’d been at the
optics.
Castell Deudraeth is the latest addition to this empire, and it looks the
part. Built in the 1840s, it is a gothic horror story — a Victorian “castle”
hewn from blackest slate, topped with scowling turrets and completely bats.
It looks like it has been scrawled on the hillside in charcoal by an
overstimulated eight-year-old.
Inside, though, there’s a big surprise. A £3.5m makeover has filled the
baronial halls with stiletto-sharp contemporary styling. The idea is to
offer an antidote to the frills and flounces of the existing Hotel
Portmeirion, opened by Sir Clough himself in 1926. Downstairs, they have
kept the original slate floors and sculpted stone fireplaces, but fused them
with lots of leather and mirrors to create the kind of bright white
brasserie Raymond Blanc would be proud of.
Upstairs, there are slick white bedrooms of vast acreage, with unfussy blond
oak furniture by Terence Conran, whirlpool baths as standard and bespoke
blankets to soften the minimalist lines. Room 9 has a bathroom in a tiny
ensuite turret, while the view from the patio of the penthouse suite is
through the arrow slits of the castle rampart. The result is a 21st- century
boutique hotel, but suffused with a whiff of wood-smoke and mountains.
What’s the food like? Inventive. The hotel’s blend of
stout Welsh materials and voguish good looks continues in the kitchen, where
the head chef, Steven Rowlands, likes to take indigenous ingredients (Bala
lamb, Anglesey oysters, Pen Llyn lobster) and pile them up in precarious
towers, leaving plenty of plate room for swirly patterns of caramelised
confits and balsamic reductions. Aptly enough for North Wales, there is an
awful lot of drizzling going on.
The food is good, but maybe not quite as good as in the more formal sister
restaurant at Hotel Portmeirion (if you book half-board, you can opt to have
dinner there instead). But Castell Deudraeth’s conservatory dining room
comes into its own at breakfast, when the silvery Dwyryd estuary stretches
out beneath a crinkle-cut skyline of coastal hills. In summer, you can eat
in the restored Victorian garden and breathe nosefuls of Britain’s freshest
air.
Isn’t the village itself a bit cheesy, though? Yes, but
that’s the point. Whereas Castell Deudraeth is achingly of the moment, the
genius of Portmeirion is that it is timelessly out of fashion. Sir Clough’s
original dream was to create “an ideal village” of Prince Charles-style
prettiness. Unfortunately, the old boy didn’t really have the cash. He
proceeded to raid condemned ancestral estates for romantic buildings, such
as the Jacobean town hall and the 18th-century Bristol Colonnade, while
doing a Blue Peter-style DIY job on the rest.
What remains for posterity is a life-size Lilliput where windows are often not
windows (they are painted onto buildings), the lighthouse has no light and
the ketch on the quayside is harboured in solid cement.
Even so, you’ll wander the streets in a state of delighted disbelief, your eye
perpetually drawn to sheet-metal mermaids, cut-out cupids, plasterwork
buddhas and cavorting cherubim and seraphim. And where else can you visit a
trompe-l’oeil toilet block? No wonder the writer of the thirtysomething
drama series Cold Feet chose to set his climactic episode here — Portmeirion
is in tune with the kitsch-is-cool generation.
Once the day-trippers leave, you get all the strangeness to yourself. Stroll
through the deserted piazza between pools of pink and purple light, and the
illusion of a place not quite of this world is complete.
Anything to see out in the real world? Only the most
spectacular landscape this side of Scotland. Pull on your hiking boots and
pick a peak to match the girth of your calf muscles: anything from the 800ft
Moel-y-Gest, a mini mountain right next door to Portmeirion, to Snowdon,
almost five times taller. Alternatively, you can leave the huffing and
puffing to the Snowdon Mountain Railway, which goes almost to the top. The
summit cafe was designed by Sir Clough, too — and tests to the limit his
credo that “developing a beautiful site need not lead to its defilement”.
Back at the seaside, Tremadog Bay is pegged down by two rugged 13th-century
castles, Criccieth and Harlech, with many hard-sand beaches in between,
including Black Rock Sands, just a gull’s glide from Portmeirion. The
stretch at the Criccieth end has a Blue Flag.
Who should go? People who like their country retreats to be
chic as well as cheerful.
Who shouldn’t? Agoraphobics: the wide open spaces
extend both inside and outside your window.
Castell Deudraeth has seven rooms and four suites; doubles cost £175-£240,
room-only; breakfast is £12pp. A two-night break starts at £258pp,
half-board. Call 01766 770000 or visit
www.portmeirion-village.com
