Inside Patrick Leigh Fermor's beautiful, book-filled house in the Peloponnese
“It is a room of the world,” wrote the poet John Betjeman when describing Joan and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s living room in their Kardamyli house, at the edge of the Western Peloponnese. He was referring, no doubt, to the space’s beauty and location— at the foot of Mount Taygetus and overlooking the Messenian Gulf—but also to the pollination of ideas, works, and conversations that must have gone on within its walls while the Leigh Fermors were in residence. It’s a classic case of “if these walls could talk.”
After many years of being guests or house sitters in their friends’ homes, the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and the photographer Joan Eyres Monsell found the perfect spot to build their Greek home. Just outside the town of Kardamyli, at the very top of the Mani Peninsula, Leigh Fermor found, while swimming nearby, a promontory sitting between two bays covered with ancient olive trees and the elegant spikes of cypress trees. The land’s beauty and isolation helped the couple decide to build a house that is, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful in the world.
A bit like a boat on the high seas because of the way the Leigh Fermors designed room after room facing both gardens and water, the house is constantly crisscrossed by winds, enveloped by the scents of the gardens and the forest around it. As he designed the house pretty much by instinct, one can safely say that Leigh Fermor must have had an innate understanding of proportion and balance, as well as a finely tuned sense of the theatrical. The building is not very large, yet it feels generous and expansive. The spirit of the Leigh Fermors gently haunts the space, giving it a sense of luxe, calme et volupté.
The Kardamyli house—which has been left to their beloved Benaki Museum— provided the perfect place for the couple to withdraw and work in peace, but also, thanks to their ever-curious and generous nature, to welcome the world when it came knocking.
The journey from Athens to Kardamyli is short in terms of time—just over four hours— but it is enormous in terms of the pivotal roles that some of the places along the road have played in the history of Greece and the development of Western culture. Along the way, one is entranced by the incredible beauty of the landscape, yet nothing prepares the traveler, on reaching the west coast of the Peloponnese, for the sight that awaits as the road descends from the heights of Mount Taygetus toward Kardamyli and the sea.
Haute Bohemians: Greece by Miguel Flores-Vianna, is published by Vendome Press.
Miguel Flores Vianna1/8The dining table was designed by the writer himself.
Miguel Flores Vianna2/8The desk in Joan Leigh Fermor’s bedroom. She first came to Greece to photograph it for the British Council, and her images show a country still relatively unchanged after the upheavals of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War.
Miguel Flores Vianna3/8One of the guest bedrooms features two prints depicting Crete.
Miguel Flores Vianna4/8Leigh Fermor’s traveling trunk.
Miguel Flores Vianna5/8The living room opens onto the large terraced garden facing the sea.
Miguel Flores Vianna6/8The large, pebble-paved exedra serves as a living and dining space, with ancient sculpture fragments as decoration. Leigh Fermor worked with a master stonecutter, one of the few remaining at the time, who used centuries-old techniques.
Miguel Flores Vianna7/8The upper exedra next to the house.
Miguel Flores Vianna8/8
