Couple restores Swahili charm in an old house

The best interiors in Lamu are often in private homes and boutique hotels where the owners are committed to either preserving or restoring lost elements from the Coast’s traditional Swahili culture.

It’s not always easy as when Kicki and Paul Aarts moved into their Lamu home in 1990 and found the previous owner had ripped out and sold all the exquisite antique Lamu doors. But the Aarts did manage to retain the Omari arches in their living room, making up for (to some degree) the doors that went missing.

When the Aarts first moved into their home, which they officially named Subira House, it had just one floor and the previous tenants had not maintained the premises well at all.

“Subira means waiting with pleasure or serenity,” explained Kicki.

Mangrove poles

But since Kicki had fallen in love with Lamu back in the 1970s when she first came from Sweden to visit a friend, she had lived several places in the town and knew this was the place — right behind the old Lamu Fort— where she wanted to settle down with Paul and their two sons.

Both Kicki and Paul are visionaries when it comes to home construction, so they not only rehabbed their Subira House; they built upwards by several floors, always bearing in mind the traditional style of Swahili construction, including the use of mangrove poles to stabilise their ceilings and the top floor terraces that afforded spectacular views of the ocean and adjacent islands.

Now they’ve got a ground floor open-air stucco courtyard where they regularly serve evening meals under the stars which are quite visible on Lamu nights. They also have four lovely guest rooms (each with a typical four-poster Swahili bed) and one guest apartment.

But possibly one of the most pleasing features of Subira House is the lush green garden that Kicki maintains behind the second open-air courtyard.

She’s especially fond of her Moringa and Tulip trees, but also her triangular fish pond covered in miniature water lilies (looking rather like a mini-Monet painting).

The one feature of Subira House that you are bound to see in every old Swahili home along the Indian Ocean coastline is the ‘videka’ niche.

Mentoring youth

It’s the most elaborate ornamental feature in the traditional Swahili house and historically, it’s been hand-crafted by artisans who carefully create the three-dimensional hollow squares together with their surrounding arabesque designs, made out of a special mixture of finely ground coral and lime stone blended with a portion of binding cement.

But in recent years, the art of making videka was nearly lost as the artisans who once specialised in the ancient craft have become a dying breed. Plus many of them grew old without mentoring the youth, many of whom were also not interested at the time.

The one young man who recognised that the videka-skill was dying is Ahmed Yusuf, an artisan in his early 30s who went out of his way to find the old videka masters and learn directly from them.

Now he’s the specialist in the skill and travels all over the Coast and upcountry as well creating triple decker and quadruple decked videka niches in homes where the owners appreciate the ancient art.

Videka niches

Ahmed also trains other young men, even as he fills commissions like the one he has currently with Herbert Menzer, the German former restaurateur and founder of both the Lamu Arts and Lamu Painters Festivals.

Herbert’s been building replicas of beautiful old Swahili homes for the past few years and in every one of them—from Jaha House to Habibti House to the Fishbone House, he’s enlisted Ahmed to create exquisite videka niches, some of which cover whole walls with the three-dimensional sculpted wall reliefs.

In a sense, the liberal use of videka by Herbert shows how he committed he is to authentic Swahili culture, especially as his walls could otherwise be filled with exquisite paintings produced by the scores of professional painters who’ve come from all over Europe and Kenya to take part in the Lamu Painters Festivals.

Herbert shares his homes with his guests, but he also presents them on his Lamu Holidays website to share with strangers.

His biggest construction challenge to date is the largest, most grand house, called the Casbah, which he’s been building with Ahmed playing a critical role to ensure that Casbah, like Jaha, Habibti and Fishbone, contains the purest Swahili cultural design, but is also equipped with all the modern amenities that any traveller would expect to find in a normal five-star hotel.