Sir Clough Williams-Ellis, Portmeirion's architect, denied repeated claims that the design was based on the fishing village of Portofino on the Italian Riviera.

The main building of the hotel and the cottages "White Horses", "Mermaid", and "Salutation" had been a private estate called Aber Iâ (English: Ice estuary), developed in the 1850s on the site of a late 18th-century foundry and boatyard.

Williams-Ellis changed the name (which he had interpreted as "frozen mouth") to Portmeirion: "Port-" from its place on the coast; "-meirion" from the county of Merioneth (Meirionydd) in which it was sited.

In 1931 Williams-Ellis bought from the estate of his uncle, Sir Osmond Williams, Bt (1849-1927), the Victorian crenellated mansion Castell Deudraeth with the intention of incorporating it into the Portmeirion hotel complex, but the intervention of the war and other problems prevented this.

Eventually, with support from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the European Regional Development Fund as well as the Wales Tourist Board, his original aims were achieved and Castell Deudraeth was opened by the Welsh opera singer Bryn Terfel as an 11 bedroom hotel and restaurant on 20 August 2001, 23 years after Williams-Ellis's death.

Musician Jools Holland visited whilst filming for the TV music show The Tube, and was so impressed that he had his studio and other buildings at his home in Blackheath built to a design inspired by Portmeirion.

Portmeirion is today a major tourist attraction in North Wales[7] and day visits can be made on payment of an admission charge.

The village was the setting of the inaugural Festival N°6, which took place in September 2012 and featured headline acts Spiritualized, Primal Scream and New Order.

But he realized earlier than most of his architectural contemporaries how constricted and desiccated modern forms can become when the architect pays more attention to the mechanical formula or the exploitation of some newly fabricated material than to the visible human results.

... [I]t is prompted by [the] impulse ... to reclaim for architecture the freedom of invention — and the possibility of pleasurable fantasy — it had too abjectly surrendered to the cult of the machine.

He described the total effect as "relaxing and often enchanting" with "playful absurdities" that are "delicate and human in touch", making the village a "happy relief" from the "rigid irrationalities and the calculated follies" of the modern world.

[13] Its location by the sea means it is frost-free, making it possible to grow rare plants such as camellias[14] and "an outstanding rhododendron collection of the early twentieth century".

These include the 1960 Danger Man episode "View from the Villa" starring Patrick McGoohan and the 1976 four-episode Doctor Who story titled The Masque of Mandragora set in Renaissance Italy.