Khadambi Asalache

Khadambi Asalache (28 February 1935 – 26 May 2006) was a Kenyan poet and author who settled in London, England. He was later a civil servant at HM Treasury. He left his lavishly decorated South London terraced house, 575 Wandsworth Road, to the National Trust.

Early life Asalache was born in Kaimosi in western Kenya, the eldest child of the local chief. The novel focused on Kenyan tribesmen opposing a usurper and quickly became an international success; it went into ten editions worldwide and, according to The Times, "was on the syllabus of many schools in Africa, putting Asalache among the most serious writers in the burst of East African novels in English in the 1960s and 1970s." A collection of his poems, Sunset in Naivasha, was published by Eothen Books in 1973. His poem "Death of a Chief" was included in the Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry in 1995;

Asalache received an MPhil degree in philosophy of mathematics from Birkbeck College in the 1970s, and became a civil servant at the Treasury. 575 Wandsworth Road was in Lambeth on the number 77 bus route, allowing him to commute almost direct to his workplace. The property was in a poor state of repair when he bought it, having previously been occupied by squatters. For 20 years, he decorated it internally with Moorish-influenced fretwork that he cut by hand from discarded pine doors and wooden boxes.

The house was shown in The World of Interiors in July/August 1990, and the Sunday Telegraph Magazine in February 2000. Tim Knox, director of Sir John Soane's Museum, wrote about the house in Nest in late 2003, describing it as an extremely serious and carefully worked out exercise taking its inspiration from the Mozarabic reticulations of the Moorish kingdoms of Granada. The work also takes inspiration from the Great Mosque of Cordoba, the Alhambra and Generalife in Granada, doors in Zanzibar, panelled interiors in Damascus, the waterside houses or yalı in Istanbul,

According to Elsie Owusu, founding chair of the Society of Black Architects, the house "could be described as an embodiment of the social, political and artistic history of the British colonial experience in the 20th Century." subject to raising an endowment of £3m to £5m for its maintenance. The National Trust obtained museum status for 575 Wandsworth Road in 2019.