Yesterday, we also visited the Kenyan home of Karen Blixen, a Danish writer best known for chronicling her years running a coffee farm in the highlands outside Nairobi, Kenya, then British East Africa. Her home stands today as a beautiful museum, complete with much of her furniture and belongings, highlighting both her life and how she became a national treasure in Kenya.

Born in 1885 near Copenhagen, Karen moved to Africa in 1914 after marrying Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, and the couple established a plantation at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The marriage ended in divorce, and after years of hardship, including the death of her lover Denys Finch Hatton and the eventual collapse of the farm due to falling coffee prices, Blixen returned to Denmark in 1931.

It was there that she turned her African years into literature. Writing in English under the pen name Isak Dinesen, she published Out of Africa in 1937, a memoir blending vivid descriptions of the landscape, the people she came to know, and her own sense of loss as the farm and her old life slipped away. The book became her most celebrated work, later adapted into the 1985 film of the same name. Blixen also wrote acclaimed short story collections, including Seven Gothic Tales, and remains one of the most popular literary voices from the colonial-era African experience.

After Blixen left Kenya, her farm was sold to a consortium of developers who subdivided the land for residential use, a process that gave rise to the Nairobi suburb still known today as Karen, named in her honor. Our hotel, Macushla House, stands on ground which was once owned by Karen.

The farmhouse itself changed hands several times over the following decades, at one point serving as a private residence and later as an agricultural training college. In 1964, the Danish government gifted the house to Kenya to mark the country’s independence, and it eventually opened to the public as the Karen Blixen Museum in 1986, timed to coincide with the release of the Out of Africa film adaptation.

It has become one of Nairobi’s most visited cultural sites, drawing both literary pilgrims retracing her story and visitors curious about colonial-era East Africa.