By its creator, Clough Williams-Ellis. An Italianate village planted on the coast of North Wales, colourful and extravagant-an experiment in town planning, or one man's romantic folly? Clough Williams-Ellis , architect, writer, and conservationist, is now eighty-six. ' I wanted to show that you could in fact develop even a very beautiful place without defiling it-that you could even enhance what God had given you as a site to start with. And at Portmeirion I felt He'd given me everything possible.'