Durrell's White House: The Room Where Prospero's Cell Was Written

A working taverna on the water at Kalami that happens to be the house where Lawrence Durrell lived and wrote his most celebrated book about the island.

Most literary pilgrimages end at a plaque.

You stand where something happened, read the inscription, and leave. The White House is different, because the thing that happened here is still, in a sense, happening. People still eat lunch on the terrace where it was written.

A Different Starting Point

In 1935, Lawrence Durrell and his wife Nancy moved into a house at the head of Kalami Bay on Corfu's northeast coast — a converted fisherman's cottage, a second storey added for them by the Atheneos family who owned it. He described it in the book he wrote there: "a white house, set like a dice in a rock already venerable with the scars of wind and water."

That book was Prospero's Cell, still regarded as one of the finer travel books written about Greece. Durrell lived and worked there until 1939, when the war ended the family's time on the island.

The house has stayed in the same family since. The ground floor is a taverna. The upper floor, where the Durrells lived and wrote, is let as accommodation in season.

The Durrell Confusion, Clarified

Worth untangling, because the association gets blurred.

This is Lawrence Durrell's house, not his younger brother Gerald's — and it's Lawrence's writing, not Gerald's, that the White House commemorates. Gerald Durrell, later a celebrated naturalist and the author of My Family and Other Animals, is the Durrell most people know from the ITV series The Durrells, and he did visit Kalami as a boy. But the family he wrote about was based elsewhere on the island, at Kontokali and Perama.

The White House is specifically Lawrence's ground — the place he wrote from, not the setting of his brother's more famous memoir. Visitors expecting to see "the Durrells' house" from the television series are, strictly, in the wrong bay. What they get instead is arguably the more serious literary site of the two.

What's on the Table

The taverna operates as an ordinary, excellent restaurant, open to anyone, no ticket required. Traditional Greek cuisine, served on a terrace at the water's edge, walls carrying photographs and memorabilia from the Durrell years.

You can simply arrive, eat, and leave having sat where a significant piece of English travel writing was composed — which is a lower bar of commitment than most literary tourism demands, and part of why it works.

Beyond the Table

For a deeper visit, the White House Experience runs guided hikes along the trails above Kalami that inspired both brothers — Gerald's fascination with the island's wildlife, Lawrence's with its light and stillness — returning to the White House for a swim from the rocks where the Durrells themselves used to sit, and finishing with a meal on the terrace.

On certain dates through the season, the upper floor itself opens for viewing — the actual rooms, the actual view through the window Durrell wrote about directly, "the windows give directly on the sea."

Wider Context

Corfu trades heavily on the Durrell name, largely through the television series, and most of that traffic goes to the Durrells' more accessible, TV-friendly locations closer to Corfu Town.

Kalami is an hour's drive from town, on a winding road, with limited parking and a steep walk down to the bay — a real journey rather than a coach-tour stop. That friction has arguably protected it. The White House hasn't been remade into an attraction; it's still a family-run taverna that happens to carry an extraordinary provenance, run by descendants of the same family who took the Durrells in ninety years ago.

Why It Earns Its Place

Because it does the rare thing of being both entirely genuine and entirely usable. This isn't a preserved room behind glass. It's a working restaurant where you can order fish, drink the local wine, and read a page of Prospero's Cell at the table it was arguably written at.

For anyone who has read Durrell, or wants an excuse to, Kalami is the version of literary tourism that doesn't feel like tourism at all.

For anyone planning a slower Greek-island trip built around long lunches, quiet coves and unhurried evenings, the Reset Series guides and the Reset Companion are a useful pairing for the sleep, digestion and recovery that come with the heat, the walking and the wine.

Related reading: Drakos Taverna — The View Matters More Than the Menu · Gundari — Folegandros's First Five-Star Resort · The Palace of the Grand Master — Rhodes's Fortress That Isn't Quite What It Claims

Who it's for

• Anyone who has read Lawrence Durrell's Prospero's Cell, or wants a reason to.
• Those wanting a genuine literary site that's still a living, working restaurant rather than a museum.
• Not for anyone seeking the Durrells TV series locations specifically — those are elsewhere on the island.