Karen Blixen Museum

The Karen Blixen Museum occupies the bungalow in which Danish author Karen Blixen lived on her coffee farm below the Ngong Hills, on the outskirts of Nairobi in Kenya, between 1917 and 1931. The house was built in 1912 by Swedish engineer Ake Sjogren and later bought by Karen and Bror Blixen, who ran the surrounding estate as a coffee plantation. After financial collapse and the failure of the coffee crop, Blixen sold the land and returned to Denmark, where she published 'Out of Africa' in 1937 under the pen name Isak Dinesen. The land was subdivided and the suburb that grew around it was named Karen in her honour. The house was presented to the Kenyan government by the Danish government at independence in 1963 and opened as a museum run by the National Museums of Kenya in the 1980s, following the 1985 film adaptation starring Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, parts of which were shot at the property. The museum preserves the house much as it was in Blixen's time. Visitors walk through the dining room, library, bedroom and sitting room, which hold period furniture, some of it belonging to Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton, as well as photographs, letters and household objects. The architecture is a single-storey colonial bungalow with a wide veranda, a pitched roof and timber-framed windows, set in lawns and gardens with views toward the Ngong Hills that Blixen described in her writing. The presentation is a guided walk-through rather than a thematic gallery: guides lead visitors room by room, covering Blixen's life, her relationship with Finch Hatton, the coffee farm and the history of the film. The old coffee-processing factory and grounds are also part of the site. Restoration work by the National Museums of Kenya has kept the house in good condition, and a small gift shop and cafe operate on the grounds. The house stands on Karen Blixen Road in the Karen neighbourhood, roughly 10 kilometres south-west of central Nairobi.