Stone Boat

The Amis Reunis (1930) is neither quite a building nor yet a ship though a bit of both. Almost as soon as Portmeirion opened in 1926 Clough bought and converted a graceful old Porthmadog trading ketch of some seventy tons which he moored alongside the quay. This he used as a houseboat with water and electricity laid on. Part of the idea was that the sight of a considerable sea-going ship tied up to the wharf might suggest to seafarers that the little port was in business once again. During a sudden gale with a spring tide under her and anchors trailing she was carried out towards the island, Ynys Gifftan, and there stranded on a down-sloping shoal so that when the tide ebbed she lay on her beam ends, her masts nearly horizontal and her keel in the air. Having failed to save her, and being at that time engaged in building the new quay to replace the shale bank below the hotel, Clough noticed that the quay's end followed almost exactly the line of the ship's  bulwarks and resolved to salve what he could from the wreck and to reconstruct her as a ship-aground. Sections of her stout mainmast act as pillars supporting the dining room's flat roof. 
The hotel lawn balustrading and its Coade stone statues are original Victorian features which Clough embellished in 1930 with an elegant quayside loggia called the Casino.