When I was 19 I stayed with my boyfriend’s mother for a summer, high up under a small mountain in Snowdonia. In an extraordinary old house and garden called Plas Brondanw on the scarp slope of the valley below we visited a friend of his grandmother’s, a venerable lady in a chignon, full skirts and wool stockings, who scrutinised us kindly. This was the author and critic Amabel Williams-Ellis, a Bloomsberry, a Strachey by birth and the widow of Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, conservationist, maverick architect and creator of Portmeirion village. With parents like these it would have been near impossible for their eldest child, Susan, to grow up ‘ordinary’.
Amabel dispatched us to Portmeirion, Clough’s fairytale fantasy seaside resort, when the pottery that Susan had founded was operating at full peak, its gift shops full of her best-selling ‘Botanic Garden’ ceramicware. Every ten years or so afterwards, I found my way back to the edenic Plas Brondanw and its enchanted gardens, girdled by small Welsh mountains, full of Sir Clough’s fantastical follies, far from the madding crowd. My local connections unravelled over time and the house was closed up and tenanted, but a year ago I found it open again, in the hands of a family trust and reincarnated as the Susan Williams-Ellis Foundation.
Although I’d known of Susan by reputation – my mother loved her pottery – I’d had no idea that she was such a prodigious over-achiever: scuba diver, textile designer, book illustrator and innovator. Founding Portmeirion Pottery in 1960, she had easily achieved as much as her distinguished coevals Laura Ashley, Mary Quant and Terence Conran, but in staying close to her Welsh roots, she remains so much less well known.
After attending seven different schools – including the progressive Dartington Hall, where she was taught ceramics by Bernard and David Leach – Susan fixed on an artistic vocation. At 18 she’d already designed and co-authored In and Out of Doors with her family, a gaily illustrated miscellany of creative activities for children. At Chelsea Polytechnic in c1936–38 she studied for two days a week with Henry Moore and two with Graham Sutherland, before contributing technical illustrations for the war effort alongside seaweed and fishy tile designs fabricated by Poole Pottery for the patriotic Britain Can Make It exhibition of 1945. At the end of the war she married her brother’s friend Euan Cooper-Willis. They moved back to north Wales and set up house in a small stone cottage in the woods, keeping pigs, growing vegetables and starting a family. It was an early experiment in ‘dropping out’ and self-sufficiency.
By the early 1950s, Portmeirion, with its extraordinarily picturesque hotel and holiday cottages, was becoming a thriving tourist attraction. Susan and Euan took on managerial roles there and she seized on the idea of creating giftware – ceramics, household goods, carpets, textiles – to sell in the village’s souvenirs shops and furnish its buildings. At first she sent off her designs to the potteries of Stoke-on-Trent, but in 1960 and 1961, she and her husband bought two declining potteries there to streamline production. While Gray’s Pottery had been making transferware products for her for several years, Kirkham Pottery was failing, with an inventory from Victorian times that had reached obsolescence: think Florence Nightingale-era bedpans alongside leech and apothecary jars. Susan worked with these basic shapes, reusing old transfer patterns and drawing new ones for mixing bowls and cylindrical lidded jars, flour dredgers and the tall cylinder coffee pots that became a signature of Portmeirion Pottery in the 1960s and 1970s. By 1961, Susan’s ceramics were so popular that a second Portmeirion shop was trading from fashionable Pont Street in Chelsea.
Drawing and painting were key to her design processes. Her huge paper archive comprising postcards and scraps of ephemera, finished pen-and-ink and painted sketches and transfer motifs reworked and resized is safely held in the archives of her foundation. Thanks to the invention of the photocopy machine she enjoyed playing about in multiples, tweaking and re-engineering and perfecting to her heart’s content. Two or three drawers of a mahogany chest hold the curtains and fabric lengths she designed for the textile manufacturer Bernard Wardle, salvaged from Portmeirion village when changing fashions and sun damage took their toll. And there are superb ceramics too – not a full inventory, for that would run into thousands of pieces, but certainly representative of her greatest hits.
Susan’s designs changed with the decades, but she was always ahead of – or bang on – trend. The pleasure here is to find and marry up her artwork and finished productions. Described by one journalist as ‘the mermaid artist’, she used her diving prowess to sketch underwater with wax and pastel crayons on tracing paper pinned to a marine ply board. Her sea pictures are extraordinary, and her shell designs are masterpieces of natural history, worthy of Charles Darwin.
Best of all are her mermaids, more playful and flirty versions of the buxom model devised by her father to become a graphic signature of the Portmeirion brand. The 1960s and 70s saw her work- ing up a smörgåsbord of rainbow colour and pattern, punchy Pop modernity and trendy Victorian revivalism. This was the era of the ‘Totem’ patterns, ‘Magic Garden’, ‘Talisman’ and ‘Chemist’ prints, as well as my favourite, the monochrome ‘Sporting Scenes’, which made use of a Thomas Bewick design. In 1972 came the ubiquitous ‘Botanic Garden’ ware, which quickly took over the lion’s share of the factory’s output. By 1990, when the pottery won a Queen’s Award for Exports, Portmeirion had floated on the stock market and the company’s annual turnover topped £9 million.
Working almost single-handedly, Susan Williams-Ellis had created one of the first ‘lifestyle’ retail brands that fully read and fed its customers’ appetites. ‘Good design is also good business’ was the motto she had taken on from her father, Clough. Susan died in 2007, aged 89 and still working hard.
Plas Brondanw, Llan- frothen, Penrhyndeudraeth, Gwynedd LL48 6SW. For opening times, visit plasbrondanw.org
A version of this article also appeared in the April 2025 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
