Return to Mani – Part 2. The house built by Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor

The terrace

The house at Kalamitsi is built in an olive grove, sited on a promontory that obtrudes into the Messenian Gulf. To the north-west the land rises, and a precipitous cliff encloses a small beach, accessible from the house by a stone stairway built into the rock. To the south and south-west the land descends in cultivated terraces to a larger pebble-beach, which can also be reached via a public dirt-track. The main property consists of the house itself and the writer’s studio, set a few yards apart. Two smaller outhouses lie outside the curtilage. 

Sunset on the terrace

The house, built of stone cut from Mount Taygetos, makes magnificent use of its site. At the entrance level, it appears to consist of just one storey and is surrounded by a huge, level terrace, covered in terracotta tiles and interspersed with highly inventive pebble mosaics and decorations. Into the terrace are sunk three separate areas for seating, each formed around a stone table. From here the views of the coast to the north-west and south-east, and of the close-lying islet of Meropi are beautiful. We saw sunsets of great majesty, with the sky dressed in the gentlest palette of rose-pinks. At night, the black-cloth of the heavens was satin-sable and the constellations brilliant, while the waxing half-moon lay out a silver carpet across the sea. This terrace is expansive and generous, immediately suggestive of a gregarious personality; it is one of the house’s two main entertainment areas.

But this view of the house occludes its complex design and gives a somewhat misleading impression. The house is not, as it appears from the terrace, a single-storey linear building. Its shape is better described as an inverted capital gamma (Γ), of which the shorter limb spills over the terrace edge to enclose a lower-level basement. This becomes clear only as the house is entered and reveals itself from within.

The arcaded gallery

Behind the two-leaved entrance door a barrel-vaulted vestibule, lined with stone seating, leads coolly into the heart of the house: an arcaded gallery that joins the house’s two wings and looks out towards the sea. This gallery is open to the elements and resembles a fragment of mediaeval cloister. It is surprising, beautiful in itself and, even from inside, focuses the attention on the house’s sublime environment. From here an external stone staircase descends to the lower level of the house (there is also an internal wooden staircase), where the southernmost façade projects over an enormous vaulted arch, within which a seating area allows for al fresco eating. This is where the dinner in Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight (2013), starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, was filmed. We ate here too, whenever we could.

The salon

On the main level of the house there are four suites of rooms. The most magnificent room is the salon, which was beautifully described by Paddy Leigh Fermor himself in A. Lees-Milne & D. Moore, The Englishman’s Room (1986): p.91-95. Measuring about ten metres by five, this is the principal seating and dining area of the house. Its floor is made of green stone from Pelion, its ceiling is a fretwork of honey-coloured pine. At one end the room has a beautiful Turkish hayiati with divan set around it. A divan is set around the other end too, where, in winter, it is warmed by an astonishing stone fireplace, built to a Persian model. Into all the walls are set bookcases, each full of books. The salon opens onto the main terrace, which it matches for easy-going sociability. 

The sitting-room in Joan's suite

Also on this level are the two main bedroom suites, each consisting of a bedroom, a bathroom and a sitting-room. The suite that was Paddy’s has an undramatic view of the north of the property, and is restrained and introspective. Joan’s suite, by contrast, occupies the first floor of the southern wing of the house, and has a majestic view – on three sides – of the seascape and landscape. Captivated by the spectacle, we occupied this suite.

Between the bedroom suites lie the entrance vestibule and the spatious kitchen. The basement of the house has a bedroom, now with en-suite facilities, and was also used as a bookstore for Paddy’s enormous library; this has been converted into a study area. 

Paddy's study

Across from the main house is the studio that Paddy completed in 1969. It is a single-storey building, also of stone, with a pergola on the roof-terrace. Inside, it contains the study itself and a separate bedroom and bathroom. A small kitchen has also now been installed. The study has many bookcases, lined with books, and the author’s writing-desk. Like the suite of rooms that Paddy had in the main house, the study is an introspective space: the dramatic views of the shoreline are visible only with effort. The room turns around and into itself, focusing the mind on the task in hand. 

So much for the lay-out of the house. But what was it like to live there? 

From the start, the house seemed to me to imply a split personality or, to put it less dramatically, to express a dual purpose. On the one hand, the spaces for entertainment are among the most gregarious I have ever seen. The house cries out for guests to people it, for human conversation, for laughter and for times spent in good company. At the start of our stay, David and I were alone for three days in the house and we craved our friends’ company. We felt the character of the property change and lighten as our friends arrived; it came into its own.

Books everywhere

But the house is also a place for study and for intellectual pursuits. Even though the Benaki has removed some of the later bookcases (the removal of the excessive clutter is a good and necessary thing!), there are still books everywhere. Almost every room has spaces where you can sit down and read, and the same is true outside too. When you look up from your book, you may catch a glittering reflection from the surface of the sea or notice the gnarled form of an olive tree or admire the distant mountains across the gulf, but your eye soon returns to the book and you are absorbed again.

This dual use made me think at first of the villas of Roman intellectuals. At Tusculum, in the Alban Hills, Cicero had bought a villa that he laid out for intellectual relaxation (he built what he called an ‘Academy’ and a ‘Lyceum’, and wrote many of his philosophical treatises there). But the Tusculanum was also a very public place. From a later time, Pliny the Younger describes, in a lovely letter to his friend Pedanius Fuscus, how he would spend a typical day in the villa on his busy estates at Tifernum Tibernum, in modern-day Umbria: first dealing with business, then writing and reading (and sometimes going off on a hunt).

Something of this spirit certainly infuses the house that Paddy and Joan built. But as the days of our stay went on and even with the presence of our friends, I found myself increasingly impressed by the house’s solitude: its remoteness, its isolation, the constant sound of the sea. More like Cicero’s villa at Astura (which too was built on a promontory by the sea and was ‘secluded and free from observers if one wants to do some writing’) than the Tusculanum, the house strongly encourages solitude and solitary pursuits. The open arcaded gallery provides, I think, more than a mere hint of monasticism; it gets to the heart of the matter. 

Bust of Paddy

None of the suites of rooms internally connects with each other; they all open instead to the gallery. Since the gallery is unglazed, this must have been particularly challenging in the winter, causing the occupants to gather together around the large fireplace in the salon or to go it alone in their own rooms. The house reminded me that Paddy had written A Time To Keep Silence (1957), which recounts – somewhat surprisingly, since he didn’t otherwise appear to be interested in religion – the author’s experiences of monasticism, the interest he had in silence as a counterpart to his gregarious life. I shall now re-read that book because I suspect it unlocks a very important part of the personality of the house itself, a personality that seems to me strongly divided.

This in short is a glorious, intriguing, unique house and it was a huge pleasure and honour to be invited by the Benaki Museum to spend a week there. As I mentioned in my first blog, the house has been wonderfully restored and it now awaits both its official re-opening and, even more importantly, the arrival of the writers whose presence will implement the most important part of Paddy and Joan’s bequest. I wish them every inspiration and congratulate the Benaki Museum and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation on a magnificent restoration job. 

John 

The external stone staircase

Space for eating 'Before Midnight'

Return to Mani - Part 1

Gulf of Patras

The ferry from Bari hugged the northern shore of the Gulf of Patras. We had made this journey six years earlier when the boat from Brindisi brought me to Greece on the start of my adventure as British Ambassador. In January 2013, there was a heavy fog on the Ionian and over the gulf itself, and we saw the glorious Rion-Antirrion bridge only as we docked at Patras. Now, however, the morning light was sharp, the sky largely cloudless and blue. I picked out easily the large lagoons behind the foreshore, in the near distance Mesolonghi, the Pindus range rearing menacingly above. Thoughts of the revolutionary war swirled around my head: the naval actions - Codrington blocking and instructing Ibrahim Pasha’s fleet in early October 1827 before the final encounter at Navarino; Frank Abney Hastings aboard the fighting steam-ship Karteria; the campaigns on land - poor Mesolonghi three times besieged before the fatal, heroic Exodos; the political arguments about the future shape of the Greek state; and Byron, of course - the young man setting foot in Epirus in 1809 to search for Ali Pasha in his Albanian lairs, and fifteen years later the prematurely aged Archistrategos slowly, feverishly bled to death by his doctors. The community at Mesolonghi had shown us great hospitality in 2015, when the UK was the ‘most honoured nation’ at that year’s Exodos commemorations. It was my first taste of smoked eel, a local speciality: unimaginably good. All of this compound of ideas, associations and memories meant that I was undoubtedly back in Greece. Greece, my beloved Greece.

Some archetypes

Away from Athens, with its political machinations and sophisticated, frenzied way of life, it is easy in Greece to return to basics, to feel the archetypes reassert themselves. Life impresses through repetition of simple things: an olive tree, a fig, a giant terracotta pot, pebbles on beaches, the fragrant earth, gentle seas, boundless sky. It finds expression in stark, vivid colours: the rippling silver-green of an olive grove, the baked orange soil, whitewash on grey stones, and everywhere the intense Greek blue, reaching down from the skies to merge with the sea, turning to turquoise in the shallow bays and creeks. Tastes too are simpler: olives, country bread, salty feta, huge but sweet tomatoes, barbounia, a chilled ouzo or a palatable glass of a local rosé.

This year, we have spent a week in the Mani, as the guests of the Benaki Museum in the house built at Kalamitsi by Paddy and Joan Leigh Fermor. Paddy and Joan decided to gift it to the Benaki in 1996, and it became the museum’s possession in 2011 when Paddy died (Joan had predeceased him). The bequest brought an entail: that the house be turned into a retreat for writers and used for educational purposes. This was no easy task: the house had been built from 1964 to the designs of architect Nikos Hatzimichalis, and it had scarcely been modernised since. I visited it in 2015 and saw at once how much work would be needed to make the house function for its new purpose. Re-wiring, mending the roofs, replacing rotten windows, doors and shutters, renewing bathrooms and kitchen, installing air-conditioning and wi-fi, cataloguing the thousands of books, looking after the original works of art (Leigh Fermor owned important pieces by Craxton, Ghika and others), improving the security of the property, thoroughly cleaning and redecorating - all of this was going to be a substantial undertaking. And it was clearly going to cost a lot of money: money that would have to be raised, since no money accompanied the bequest of the house itself.

The house in its setting

Thanks to the determination, skills and planning of the team at the Benaki a large grant was secured in 2016 from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. The work began at once and was completed a couple of months ago. The restoration is magnificent: it has been done to the highest of specifications, but has also preserved the authenticity of the original designs. It still feels like a home: not an ordinary home, but the home of two immensely talented people whose characters, tastes and needs (for privacy, for company) are stamped in the stones and architecture themselves.

The house is now receiving guests: there are guided tours three times a week, every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at 11:00 am. Reservation is required by email at leighfermorhouse@benaki.gr or by phone at +30 210 3671090 (Monday to Thursday). A VIP launch is planned in October. From next year, writers and educational establishments will be invited to use the house, in line with the wishes of Paddy and Joan. And, from summer 2020 for three months a year, it will be possible for others too to rent the property. You can find booking information at www.ariahotels.gr.

The house from the beach

In my next blog I will say more about what it was like to live in the house for a week. (SPOILER ALERT: It was glorious.) But I will close now by expressing my admiration and thanks to the Benaki Museum and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation for the magnificent work they have done to conserve and transmit to future generations this unique legacy. There is no one who will fail to fall in love with and be inspired by this beautiful house in its beautiful landscape and seascape. 

...to be continued.

John

The entrance vestibule