Portmeirion wedding map print

Clough Williams-Ellis acquired the estate in 1925. It had been a private estate called Aber Iâ, developed in the 1850s, and he renamed it Portmeirion, turned the main house into a hotel that opened the following year, and kept adding to the village until 1975. He was knighted in 1972 for services to architecture and the preservation of the environment.

Much of what he built was rescued. Fragments of demolished buildings from Wales and Cheshire found new homes here, among them a plaster ceiling from Emral Hall. The Campanile went up in 1927 and 1928 and the Bristol Colonnade in 1958. Noël Coward wrote Blithe Spirit during a stay, and in 1966 and 1967 the village became the setting of The Prisoner.

The artwork holds the whole of it: the village's lanes, the hotel, and the woods of Y Gwyllt, the wild garden, spreading over the headland. Around them the estuary opens out towards the sea, its channel and sandbanks drawn as water and shore. Somewhere among all that colour and greenery, you said your vows.