After studying fine art in Rome, Geneva and Vienna, he moved to London in 1960, where he taught Swahili at the Berlitz School, and worked for the BBC African Service.
[2] His first novel, The Calabash of Life, published in 1967, focused on Kenyan tribesmen opposing a usurper and quickly became an international success.
[1] Buying a modest "two-up two-down" Georgian terraced house in London's Wandsworth Road in 1981,[1] Asalache paid less than the asking price of £31,000.
[1] For 20 years,[4] he decorated it internally with Moorish-influenced fretwork[1] that he cut by hand from discarded pine doors and wooden boxes.
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,[1] and the architecture seen on Lamu Island in his home country of Kenya.