One of Wales's finest Elizabethan town houses — rich interiors and a sense of lived history. A great counterpoint to castles: more intimate, more detailed, and wonderfully atmospheric.
Plas Mawr -- Welsh for Great Hall -- is widely considered the finest surviving Elizabethan townhouse in Britain. It sits on the High Street in Conwy, its tall lime-rendered gatehouse giving little away from the street, but beyond it lies one of the most remarkably preserved domestic interiors of the Tudor period anywhere in the country.
The house was built in three phases between 1576 and 1585 for Robert Wynn, a Welsh merchant and courtier who had served Tudor diplomats across Europe and made himself wealthy in the process. He returned to Conwy and invested his fortune in an ostentatious statement of his status -- 17 rooms across multiple levels, arranged around two courtyards, with elaborate ornamental plasterwork throughout that still bears his initials R.W. in dozens of places. Historians have described the plasterwork as the most perfect and complete memorial to Elizabethan Wales.
What makes Plas Mawr exceptional is how little it has changed. Wynn died in 1598 and his complex will triggered a legal dispute that effectively froze the house in place for years, preventing the kind of remodelling that altered most houses of this period. It passed to the Mostyn family, served variously as a courthouse, a school and lodgings, and eventually as the headquarters of the Royal Cambrian Academy of Art before Cadw took it over in 1993 and completed a four-year, three-million-pound restoration.
The house is open March to October and managed by Cadw. An audio tour is included with admission and covers both the restoration and the life of the Tudor gentry in considerable detail. It is five minutes on foot from Conwy Castle and makes for a genuinely absorbing companion visit -- the castle shows you the military ambition of the age, and Plas Mawr shows you how the wealthy actually lived.
- ✦ Highly rated by our guests
- ✦ Easy to reach from The Rosedene
- ✦ Suitable for all guests
