Sixty years before Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen swanned onto our TV screens with his theatrical ideas to liven up everyday rooms, Clough Williams Ellis was leading the way in a quiet corner of North-West Wales. As a follower from the Arts & Crafts Movement that allowed all manner of architectural individuality in the name of romanticism, Clough was an architect who knew how to have fun. His work is both wonderful and vulgar, startling and yet attractive. Clough was the king of pastiche, mixing and matching architectural details like a child at the ‘pick and mix’ counter in a sweetshop. Today we stick religiously to period renovation, authenticity and holistic interior plans, whereas Clough was working in a world before regulation with an ‘anything goes’ attitude.

Following a disastrous fire at Plas Brondanw in 1951, which left the exterior walls intact but nothing else, Clough set about renovating his home using architectural fixtures and fittings from dozens of historic structures. At a time when Britain was still burning most of its architectural salvage, and modernising its Georgian and earlier buildings damaged in WWII, Clough was avidly buying columns, porticos, railings or anything that was architecturally decorative. He then had these installed at Plas Brondaw with the gay abandon of a Victorian music-hall designer, placing classical columns next to rococo plasterwork, Georgian doors in jazz-age rooms.

Within two years the home was fully reconstructed and Clough had succeeded in pulling off the trick of creating an interior that amuses and inspires. His stamp is on every surface, and although much of it is over the top, the whole works as the masterpiece of an individual.