Lest it be thought that I’m the kind of traveller who only goes on exotic foreign adventures, I’ll discuss my favourite experience in a distinctly less exotic family destination of choice: Wales, no less. Since I was very young my family have been going here to catch cold and tramp about hills, mostly in the Snowdonia area and, despite a period of rebellion during my teens when I would sulk the whole time, I have become pretty fond of this area. For the last few years we have stayed in the same place, a converted barn with seaviews near the famous castle-town of Caernarfon. The one thing about this place that used to annoy me, the lack of mobile reception, has ceased to be a problem: the peace and quiet, as I have got older and wiser, has become a blessing (although I do still do the ‘texting from the tallest hill around’ thing upon occasion).

These holidays are all usually quite similar. However, on our most recent trip however, for one day at least, we broke our usual pattern of walking up hills in the rain. For ages I had wanted to visit the village of Portmeirion, home of the china and the cult 1960s show ‘The Prisoner’ and this time we were going to go. This village is possibly unique in its development essentially to prove a point: Clough Williams-Ellis famously built the village between 1926 and 1975 on his own private peninsula in order to criticise modern architecture and show that ‘the development of a naturally beautiful site need not lead to its defilement’. Arriving in Portmeirion for the first time, I realised that he was right.

I had expected excess, a rich man’s extravagant, backward-looking version of conservation, a pointless and rather repellent idealism, like those of modernist poets who dreamed of a return to the values of feudalism. What I got was an eclectic and inspiring mix of form and colour, a harmony between the natural and human spaces and between the traditional buildings of different cultures, such as those of Wales, England and Italy. Ellis had clearly had the instincts of an artist, the village was above all, composed, yet, unlike the worst excesses of architectural modernism, it felt warm, open; the children playing on the lawns were not overshadowed by the sterile dignity of any of the buildings. I could have explored this place for days - the gardens were extensive and offered great views of the sea.

Yes, it was touristy of course, but not in a way that I have often experienced; everyone seemed brought together in the atmosphere of beauty and fun that Ellis had created. Certainly aspects of the splendour and display were excessive (too much gold leaf), but the overall design was unerring. People say that great buildings ought to be life-affirming – here it was not one building, but the texture created by combinations of buildings, that filled me with pleasure. I was even more admiring when I discovered that many of these buildings had been rescued from demolition (in fact at the time people mocked the village as a ‘Home for Fallen Buildings’).

Architects may turn up their noses; but I’m not ashamed to admit that I love Portmeirion. And it certainly made a change from taking pictures of sheep.