All I Want Is a Room Somewhere...

From: Wikimedia Commons

"Agatha Christie was 48 years old in 1938, gaining fame and fortune from her prolific output of short stories and novels, one series starring the dandified Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, another centered on the underestimated spinster-sleuth Jane Marple. [...] Christie longed for a vacation refuge. That summer, she heard of a handsome Georgian manor house, built around 1792, going up for sale; it was set on 33 acres, 15 miles from her birthplace, the village of Torquay. For Christie, Greenway—reachable only by boat or down a narrow country lane one and a half miles from the nearest village of Galmpton—represented, as she wrote in her autobiography, 'the ideal house, a dream house.' " ( Smithsonian.com)  Read more...

"She may also have felt the pull of the garden and the boathouse, built on the spot where, it is said, Sir Walter Raleigh, smoking tobacco, had water thrown over him by a servant who thought he was on fire." (The Telegraph) Read more...

Where Henry Thoreau Penned Walden
— a more modest version of Greenway

From: The Statement

What it cost him:
• Board's: $8.03 (½, mostly shanty boards)
• Refuse shingles for roof and sides: $4.00
• One thousand old brick: $4.00
• Two casts of lime: $2.40.
• Hair: $0.31. (probably horsehair, which was used to strengthen plaster)
• Laths: $1.25
• Two second-hand windows with glass: $2.43
• Mantle-tree iron: $0.15
• Nails: $3.90
• Hinges and screws: $0.14
• Latch: $0.10
• Chalk: $0.01
• Transportation: $1.40
• In all: $28.12
(The Statement) Read more...

Bernard Shaw's Writing Hut

From: An Honest Architecture 

"Vanity Fair advertised a Lazy Susan in 1917, but it took the creative mind of Bernard Shaw to see it's potential when combined with a writing hut. The idea was ingenious for a few reasons." ( An Honest Architecture) Read more...

See also here... and here...