NATIONAL TRUST:575 Wandsworth Road Location: Clapham, SW8 3JD [map] Open: pre-booked tours at 11am, 1pm, 3pm, Thursday & Friday only (May to October) Admission: £12 Period: A long-term millennial project
Khadambi Asalache was born in Kenya, studied fine art at several European universities and moved to London in 1960 at the age of 25. He wrote poems and books, and after further studies in mathematics took a job at the Treasury, commuting in each day on the number 77A bus. In 1981 he spotted that a former squat on Wandsworth Road was up for sale, turfed out the chickens and moved in, inexorably transforming it into an astonishing work of art. You'd never guess from out front, other than a small National Trust sign inviting pre-booked visitors to wait outside.
Khadambi died in 2006, 20 years after starting work on the ultimate interior design project. It started out as a means of covering up damp on a wall shared with the nextdoor laundry, and eventually spread across every room in the house. It's perhaps best described as fretwork, a series of wooden twiddles in geometric and naturalistic forms, although additionally combined with a splash of paint, homely artwork and an accumulation of objets. Most of the wood was reclaimed from skips or other local leftovers, and all of it hand-carved using a Stanley knife with a padsaw blade. I can't show you what the interior looks like because Khadambi didn't believe in photographing his work sovisitorscan'teither.
Before his death Khadambi's friends encouraged him to pass it on to the National Trust, who then took four years to decide whether they were able to take it on. 575 Wandsworth Road finally opened to the public in 2013 after substantial fund-raising, with the caveat that only 2000 visitors a year could gain admittance. It's a narrow terraced house and a lot of the surfaces are potentially fragile, still with sticking-out pins in places, so free-flow visits could be a disaster. Each tour is thus restricted to just six people and there are only six tours a week, plus the house is closed from November through to April for conservation work. It is thus ridiculously hard to visit because the places go so fast, and I think I snapped up the last ticket of the year.
You start on the lower ground floor seated around the kitchen table for scene-setting and the health and safety talk. Every visitor is asked to bring rubber soled slippers or thick, gripped socks to protect the painted floors upstairs, although staff do keep a few spare socks in case anyone forgets. The intricate fretwork is readily apparent all around, never quite symmetrical but always in harmony and balance. I can only imagine how long each short section took to complete and how much of Khadambi's spare time this project absorbed. The shelves also include a surfeit of glasses, crockery and lustreware, all the better to reflect light and give the house some sparkle. Many of the plates still have a price label on the back, not that you're allowed to look and check.
Upstairs things get brighter and dazzlier, especially the living room with its African wall hangings, hand-carved lampshades and decorated doors. The Trust retained everything including Khadambi's extensive book collection, and it's wonderfully jarring to see a stack of compact discs preserved as part of a National Trust historic house. Every item is regularly cleaned by house staff and meticulously put back in the right place in the right orientation according to photographic guides treated as gospel. The bathroom is a little calmer, with much of the design work invisible were you lying in the bath. But the hallway is exquisite, like a backpassage in a Moorish palace, complete with well-disguised coathooks where Khadambi used it as his transition into the outside world.
I can't imagine how long the landing took to decorate, this a later stage of the project so more colourful, more elaborate and with birds and elephants amongst the symbols in the fretwork. The bedroom has even more painted elements with an African flavour, including a tiny green parrot drawn looking into a mirror, plus hearts and CND symbols incorporated into the wooden flourishes at the foot of the bed. From his typewriter in the study Khadambi could look down across a flourishing garden, now without the mimosa that was once its centrepiece (which had to be removed so it couldn't affect the foundations). The drive for authentic preservation even extends to the kitchen where all the original foodstuffs remain in the cupboards, even the opened packet of cornflour. The conservators are currently debating whether the time has finally come to empty the bottle of mustard vinaigrette now that mould has appeared around its stopper.
You won't get into 575 Wandsworth Road this year, and given the paucity of spaces probably not next year either. But if you do ever get the opportunity then grab it because it's astonishing to see how a very ordinary terraced house has been transformed into something utterly extraordinary through one man's brilliance and artistic vision.
