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A poet from Kenya covered a damp patch with a piece of carved pine, and did not stop for twenty years.
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Khadambi Asalache was born in 1935 at Kaimosi in western Kenya, the eldest son of the local chief. He studied architecture in Nairobi and then fine art in Rome, Geneva and Vienna, came to London in 1960, taught Swahili, worked for the BBC African Service, published The Calabash of Life in 1967 - one of the first modern Kenyan novels written in English, which went into ten editions - took an MPhil in the philosophy of mathematics at Birkbeck, and spent his working life as a civil servant at the Treasury.
He bought this Georgian terraced house in 1981, for less than the £31,000 asked, in poor condition and lately squatted. The basement had damp patches, and his answer to one of them was to cover it with fretwork cut from a discarded pine door. Over the next twenty years he covered almost every surface in the house the same way - walls, doors, cupboards, the bath - cutting the patterns by hand from thrown-out doors and packing cases, drawing on the Great Mosque of Cordoba, the Alhambra, the carved doors of Zanzibar, Damascus panelling and the yali, the wooden waterside houses of the Bosphorus. Against it he set murals of African landscapes and a collection of nineteenth-century English lustreware.
He died in 2006 and left the house to the National Trust, which accepted on condition that an endowment was raised to keep it. The building was listed Grade II in 1974, for the Georgian shell, and the list entry says nothing at all about what is inside.
Pre-booked guided tours only, six people at a time, Thursdays and Fridays from May to October. No shop, no cafe, no lavatories.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.