Though still off-grid, this 1840 cottage in Snowdonia, North Wales, has become increasingly domesticated during recent decades, thanks to the attentions of owner Alex Willcock, co-founder of high-end homeware and furniture brand Maker & Son.
The drive to the cottage is not for the faint of heart. The narrow lane rises for several kilometres into the hills south of Snowdon, passing, via several tight switchbacks, through ancient woodland, washed lilac with bluebells as we pass in mid-May. An occasional grazing sheep blocks the path, moving only after loud encouragement, watching our progress with ruminant disinterest. Eventually the track opens out onto an expanse of rugged mountainside into which the stone dwelling nestles, rugged and ancient-seeming, as if it too had been carved by the glaciers that shaped this part of north Wales during the last ice age. My long-suffering Volkswagen Polo being unsuited to the terrain, we undertake the last section of the journey on foot. The sky is vast and slate-coloured. There are no other dwellings visible for miles.
Alex Willcock was 18 when he made this journey in the early 1980s. He and a fellow music scholar were visiting one of their tutors from Eton, an extraordinary and inspiring man who was living in the cottage while on sabbatical. Young and foolhardy, they braved the road in a minivan. It broke down. Alex managed to fix the ripped fuel pipe with a rubber hose they had in the van. ‘I’ve always been handy,’ he explains.
Handiness, it turned out, was (and remains) a requirement for the cottage. For the first 30 years that Alex visited – first as a guest of his friend and former tutor, latterly as co-owner – there was no sink inside the house. There was no bathroom. The only running water was the nearby stream, which had, into the early years of the 20th century, driven churns that turned sheep’s milk into cheese. (In the 1950s, however, it was diverted for use by a nearby power station.) ‘It was like camping inside a house,’ says Alex. Yet this small stone dwelling in the vast stone landscape held Alex’s imagination. He made regular return pilgrimages while training as a cabinetmaker at the furniture designer John Makepeace’s short-lived but influential craft academy at Parnham House in Dorset.
Even after moving to Australia, where Alex lived for most of his twenties, he would visit the cottage every time he was back in the UK. It was off-grid in Snowdonia that he spent his stag weekend ahead of his wedding to Sophie Conran, to whom he had been introduced by her father, the late Sir Terence Conran, at the reopening of the glitzy St James’ haunt Quaglino’s, in the early 1990s. (Sir Terence was unable to join for the stag weekend and Alex laments that his father-in-law, who was also his great mentor, never saw the cottage, whose elemental beauty he surely would have appreciated.) The couple’s two children – the oldest of whom, Felix, co-founded the high-end furniture brand Maker and Son with his father in 2018 – grew up visiting the cottage, as did Alex’s three younger children by his second marriage. ‘If you ask any of my children, they will tell you it’s their favourite place in the world.’
Over the past decade, the house has grown in creature comforts thanks to Alex’s ‘handy’ interventions. Lean-tos at either end of the house, which once would have sheltered animals, have been converted into an airy dining room, illuminated in the evenings by a nine-armed candelabra, and a white-floored bathroom whose centrepiece is a deliciously deep roll-top copper bath. In both spaces, whitewashed walls and woodwork the colour of robin eggs gives a feel that is more Cyclades than Cymru. However, many traditional elements also remain: the family often cooks over the fire on the range in the living room (‘Felix makes the most incredible crumpets on the griddle pan’) where a dresser is filled with tableware bearing a bold floral motif that is traditional in the area. The oak dresser is original to the cottage – cabinetmakers would have brought their wood and tools up the track, undoubtedly even more treacherous in the 19th century, and constructed the piece on site – and some of the ceramics are nearly two hundred years old. The whole cottage is filled with antique oil lamps, by whose kerosene glow after-dinner conversations often unfold long into the night.
Like the landscape it sits in, the cottage seems to exist out of time. Alex, who has been spending longer periods there since the sale of Maker and Son this summer, describes how the particular rhythms of the place – the immediate demands of keeping the cottage running, in parallel with its physical and imaginative isolation from the noise of 21st-century life – warp one’s sense of the passage of time, or give it different meaning. Not that it’s a place of neo-monastic retreat from the world: in fact, the cottage has a long history as a place of connectivity and conversation. In the early years of Alex’s visiting, the house was often full of guests: musicians, writers, his tutor’s friends from Oxford: ‘One never knew who one was going to meet.’ For a part of the world most associated with extractive industry and faded seaside towns, this corner of Snowdonia had a thriving intellectual and artistic life in the 20th century.
The architect and early environmentalist Clough Williams-Ellis began the construction of his eccentric model village Portmeirion, a Portofino-inspired fantasia overlooking the Dwyryd estuary, in 1925. He and his wife, the writer Amabel Strachey, daughter of Spectator editor John and cousin of Bloomsbury figure Lytton, lived in the area. Their friend Betrand Russell moved nearby in the 1950s. (A chair that belonged to him sits in the cottage’s living room.) The poet Robert Graves had a house in the hills behind Harlech. Jan Morris, whose Welshness was a deep and inalienable part of her identity, lived until her death in 2020 on the Llŷn Peninsula. And, going much further back, the landscape of Snowdonia is a place of profound prehistoric spirituality, site of Bronze Age stone circles and burial mounds, ancient home to the druids. Alex describes ‘the sense of incredible peace and calm’ that he immediately experiences every time he arrives at the cottage. Simultaneously: ‘total separation from the noise of life, complete connection to the spirit of life’.
The cottage, whose metre-thick walls have already sheltered this spirit of connection for generations, has its own deeply felt presence. ‘Every time I come in I say hello to the house,’ Alex remarks. ‘And as I leave – I’m always the last – I go into a couple of the rooms and I thank them for what they’ve given me’.
A version of this article originally appeared in the December 2022 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
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