Portmeirion Botanic Garden

Portmeirion Botanic Garden is a familiar pattern of pottery in the United States. I knew it had to have some connection to the village of Portmeirion in Wales, but I didn't know what. Here's the story.

The eccentric architect who built Portmeirion had a daughter, Susan Williams-Ellis, who worked as a book illustrator for a while and did other design work. Susan and her husband moved to Portmeirion to help her father by running the souvenir shop, which was operating at a loss. They turned it around, and then took over management of the village. Susan still wanted to do design work. There was a broken down pottery near by, and Susan conceived the idea of making a line casual dinnerware with multiple designs that could mix and match.  Nobody had ever done that, and department store buyers were skeptical that the product would sell.   It did sell well at its launch in 1972, and is selling strongly today, about $42,000,000 in sales annually. That's a lot of plates and cups and bowls! At a time when the idea of "working woman" was an anathema, Susan Williams-Ellis was a successful entrepreneur, a wife, a mother, and a designer whose work has endured beyond her lifetime.

Let's take another look at Portmeirion.

One of the idiosyncratic houses in Portmeirion looks ordinary at first glance. Sir Clough Williams worried, however, about passers by looking in the windows and disturbing the privacy of the residents. So he put windows on the back and dummy windows on the front, even painting on lace curtains. The ones on the left are real; the ones on the right are dummies. Truly unique!