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From the outside, there is little to hint at anything special about this squat late-Georgian terraced house in an unloved stretch of the traffic artery that joins Clapham Junction and Vauxhall in south London. But stepping inside 575 Wandsworth Road, the former home of Khadambi Asalache, lifts the visitor straight out of the quotidian world into a carved fantasy that is both bravura do-it-yourself project and immersive artwork.
Kenyan-born Asalache bought the house in 1981. He had moved to London in the 1960s after studying architecture in Nairobi and Rome, and art in Vienna and Geneva. He was a published novelist and poet who, after completing a masters degree in the philosophy of mathematics, went to work as a civil servant at the Treasury.
In 1986, bothered by a patch of persistent damp on the basement dining room wall, he salvaged some floorboard timber to panel over it. To liven up the boards he added some home-made fretwork. This modest piece of home improvement was the catalyst for a project that was to last 19 years.
Shaping wood scavenged from rubbish skips, and unwanted pine panel doors and skirting boards from renovation projects, Asalache filled the house with decoration. (Later, when the foraged planks became scarce, he approached a local timber merchants, who were so impressed by the project they offered him a trade discount.)
His tool of choice was a pad saw, more usually used for trimming plasterboard. Its narrow, tapering blade allowed him a tight turning circle for the curlicues and lacework-like perforations he cut into the wood. The designs, drawn freehand in pencil directly on to the grain, were inspired by architectural pattern books and the elaborate, almost fractal tracery found in the Alhambra and other Moorish architecture of southern Spain.
As he expanded into shelving and other decorative elements, he drew on the Yali villas on the shores of Bosphorus in Turkey, with their slender columns and carved facades. “I never copy,” said Asalache of the work. “I look for inspiration and then change what I see to suit the space I have and the effect I want.”
He used blocks of annual leave from the Treasury to work 14-hour days, fixing the results to the walls and ceilings with panel pins and glue. Close up, the wood has rough edges and splinters but at a distance, standing at the bottom of the stairs where the hundreds of hours of saw work are most apparent, it coheres into a delicate whole.
Around and between the carvings he added painted scenes. Flowers and beasts are everywhere; in the stairwell two geese pull a cart; a herd of miniature Thomson’s gazelle sprint along the landing skirting board. The latter, Asalache said, were painted to entertain his partner Susie Thomson’s pet Tibetan spaniel.
Kelim rugs, wall hangings and shelves full of antique shop finds and souvenirs from holidays in Istanbul or Tanzania add to the eclecticism. Eighteenth-century air-twist glasses rub shoulders with 1930s lustreware.
Before Asalache’s death in 2006, he had negotiated with the National Trust for the house to be preserved as he left it and the charity has been as good its word. This adds poignancy; a jar of peaches in brandy purchased from a farm shop sits on a kitchen shelf, the contents greying with age. But overall the house leaves the visitor with an impression of what Asalache in his novel A Calabash of Life called “awe and odd splendour”. That and the sense, as with the best house museums, of having been granted a glimpse of a rich life, well lived.
nationaltrust.org.uk; reopens May 1
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