Antiques - Khadambi Asalache's London House Restored - NYTimes.com LONDON - The Kenyan poet Khadambi Asalache disguised stained and damp walls at his London town house with wooden filigree scenes of desert oases. He lived in an 1810s brick shoe box in the Lambeth section of south London, wedged between modernist housing blocks and a church graveyard. He bequeathed the place to the National Trust when he died in 2006, at 71. The National Trust is finishing a two-year restoration of the house and will let in trial tour groups next month. By next spring the property will be open to the public by appointment. Only 2,000 people a year will eventually be allowed inside, to minimize wear and tear on Mr. Asalache's silhouettes of palm trees, dancers, rosettes and giraffes. "It's just pure whimsy," the house's curator, Tessa Wild, said during a recent preview of the five rooms. He was as low-tech as you could imagine. Mr. Asalache, who took over the house from squatters in the 1980s, had a day job as a civil servant at Her Majesty's Treasury. He drilled and sawed old floorboards, doors and wine crates for his home decorations and added murals of celebrated women, including Pocahontas, Sappho, Cleopatra and Bessie Smith. He had traveled widely in Africa and Europe, and the house was inspired partly by gingerbreaded houses in Istanbul and Lamu, Kenya, and mosques in southern Spain. He bent and molded the filigree to follow the lumpy contours of the 1810s walls. Portions of his woodwork were still unfinished when he died, and even where he did complete a particular curlicue, Ms. Wild said, "He didn't always hammer the pins home." The Trust has shored up everything behind the scenes. The house required new wiring, masonry grout, slate roofing, vibration detectors and security and fire-suppression systems. Ms. Wild pointed to some tiny protrusions made here and there by the new monitoring devices, concerned that they could mar the bohemian ambience. "I didn't sleep for about three months over those," she said. She added that the house had also suffered infestations from deathwatch beetles and moths over the years. "I stopped wearing cashmere here," she added. In the backyard the Trust is restoring a garden with palm and mimosa trees and gingerbreaded fence posts. A visitors" center will be set up in an adjacent building, a former laundry. The basket weaver Susie Thomson, Mr. Asalache's companion, is advising the Trust on recreating his arrangements of lacy handmade furniture, iridescent ceramics and Ethiopian Coptic crosses. Reproductions of his geometric kilim rugs have been commissioned from weavers in Bulgaria. No explanatory text panels will be hung in the rooms, and visitors will be encouraged to come up with their own interpretations of the motifs. They can get close to the carvings. "There won't be any ropes or any kind of barriers," Ms. Wild said. Everybody will be carefully monitored but free to roam about. Just uphill from Mr. Asalache's house, reachable via a narrow outdoor staircase called Matrimony Place, is the site of a 1790s boarding school that British abolitionists set up for boys and girls from Sierra Leone. Many students died of measles and were buried in the adjacent churchyard. Their grave markers have vanished, and the most prominent monument there now is a plain stone tomb for George Hibbert, a slaveholder at Jamaica sugar plantations. Researchers are still studying the area's history, and Mr. Asalache had probably never learned that African immigrants were buried near his backyard, Ms. Wild said. "We don't think he ever knew this," she wrote in an e-mail, "but are sure he would have been moved by the thought." French advertisers in the 1890s did not much care about consistency in their visual branding. Posters showed nymphs and drab businessmen trying out new bicycles, thermoses and lamp oil, under slogans in a motley array of whiplash and blocky typefaces. "It's really this kind of crazy, anything-goes time," said Mary Weaver Chapin, the curator of "Posters of Paris: Toulouse-Lautrec and His Contemporaries," an exhibition that opens on Friday at the Milwaukee Art Museum. In the show, ads for Job cigarette papers portray one female smoker with a demure blond bun, high collar and imposing black cape, and another with black ringlets cascading down her orangy strapless gown. Posters for the Ambassadeurs cafe show acrobats in striped leotards and a bedraggled prostitute in the snow. The exhibition is also full of advertisements for poster shows and graphic design magazines, with images of artists and patrons clutching prints and paintbrushes. Collectors in the 1890s vied for the most daring lithographs, and steam-powered presses could turn out thousands of prints a day. A phenomenon called "affichomanie" ("poster mania") arose as posters were layered on Paris apartment-block facades, shop windows, scaffolding, kiosks and urinals. More ads were draped over publicity carts, which men and horses pulled through the streets, while "femmes-sandwiches," beautiful young women wearing tunics made of posters, clogged the sidewalks. In the exhibition catalog, from Prestel Publishing, Ms. Chapin quotes a French anarchist's 1893 slangy advice on how to peel posters off buildings when the police were not looking and then "pin up your loot on the walls of your pad." Some at the time argued that the posters were "commercially useless" and did not actually increase product sales. Designers were blamed for "failing their obligations" and inducing media overload. By 1900, Ms. Chapin writes, "the spectacle no longer charmed and entertained, but confronted and annoyed." Three of the best-known designers in the Milwaukee show have been the subjects of recent solo exhibitions and books. In Prague, Alphonse Mucha's "Slav Epic," a roomful of patriotic 1920s canvases, has been unfurled at the Trade Fair Palace. At a 13th-century palace in Albi, France, renovated galleries are devoted to Toulouse-Lautrec. A traveling exhibition with loans from European collections, "Toulouse-Lautrec and La Vie Moderne: Paris 1880-1910," begins next year at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno. A monograph was published last fall about Jules Chéret (from Arnoldsche Art Publishers), perhaps the most prolific artist in his crowd. He drew similar-looking pretty girls known as Chérettes in ads for aperitifs, romance novels, gardening services, skating rinks and poster shows.