by Brett Kate McKay
The
Art of Manliness

This post
is brought to you by Volvo.
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Just about
two years ago, we wrote a post called 14
Famous Man Rooms, which offered a look at the rooms where over
a dozen famous men wrote classic books, pondered big ideas, and
tinkered with their inventions. Readers offered some really great
additions in the comments, and we’ve come across more interesting,
manly rooms in the interim, so we decided to put together a follow-up
to that post. While the rooms in the former post ran the gamut from
Frederick Douglass’ office to Frank Lloyd Wright’s drafting studio,
this post focuses on libraries, writing rooms, and studies.

I don’t know
about you, but visiting historical homes is one of my favorite things
to do while on vacation. There’s something about being in the place
where people lived and loved, the rooms where they paced anxiously,
shed tears, and celebrated achievements, that really makes me feel
connected to the past and to a man’s personal history in a way that
fascinates and inspires me. If you can’t crisscross the globe this
summer, come along with us for a tour through 15 rooms where famous
men, both past and present, hatched and penned their influential
words and ideas.

Rudyard
Kipling’s Study

When Rudyard
Kipling came upon the secluded, 17th century Bateman’s House in
Sussex, he was immediately smitten. He wrote:

“We
had seen an advertisement of her, and we reached her down an enlarged
rabbit-hole of a lane. At very first sight the Committee of Ways
and Means [Mrs Kipling and himself] said ‘That’s her! The
only She! Make an honest woman of her – quick!’ We entered and
felt her Spirit – her Feng Shui – to be good. We went through
every room and found no shadow of ancient regrets, stifled miseries,
nor any menace though the ‘new’ end of her was three hundred
years old…”

The Feng Shui
of Bateman’s was good to Kipling indeed. It was here in his study
that he penned that manliest of manly poems – “If.”

William
F. Buckley’s Study

If you were
looking for William F. Buckley during his life, the first place
to check was his study, which he converted from a garage. It was
here, surrounded by mementos, books, and paintings (some of which
he did himself), that he would toil on his columns and novels, and
it was here that he was found dead when he passed away in 2008.

William
Randolph Hearst’s Library Study

Built in San
Simeon, California by newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst,
Casa Grande, or Hearst Castle as it is now known, boasted
56 bedrooms, 61 bathrooms, 19 sitting rooms, 127 acres of gardens,
indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a movie theater, tennis courts,
an airfield, and the world’s largest private zoo. Hearst himself
lived in the castle’s third floor Gothic Suite. The floor’s library
(seen above) housed more than 4,000 books, along with 150 vases
from ancient Greece.

3,000 more
books could be found in Hearst’s Gothic Study. The room served as
a private library and office from which Hearst controlled his media
empire and as an executive boardroom for discussing matters with
his cohorts as well.

Be sure to
also check out pics of the Hearst Castle’s billiards
room, theater
room, and indoor
and outdoor
pools – really unbelievable. This place is near the top of my
to-visit list (Sagamore Hill – see below – currently holds the number
one spot).

Roald
Dahl’s Writing Hut

When Roald
Dahl moved to Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire in 1965, he built
a small writing hut (you
can take a 3-D tour here) for himself. Dahl’s family has kept
the hut much like it was when the author died, but even during his
life it was a pretty dark, bare bones, ramshackle sort of place.
No one could enter the hut but Dahl himself, and no one was allowed
to clean it either; it reeked of tobacco and the floor was covered
with pencil shavings and cigarette ash.

The solitude
of his hut inspired Dahl’s creativity; he wrote all of his children’s
stories from within its little walls. Here’s how Dahl described
the power of the place:

“You become
a different person, you are no longer an ordinary fellow who walks
around and looks after his children and eats meals and does silly
things, you go into a completely different world. I personally
draw all the curtains in the room, so that I don’t see out the
window and put on a little light which shines on my board. Everything
else in your life disappears and you look at your bit of paper
and get completely lost in what you’re doing. You do become another
person for a moment. Time disappears completely. You may start
at nine in the morning and the next time you look at your watch,
when you’re getting hungry, it can be lunchtime. And you’ve absolutely
no idea that three or fours hours have gone by.”

Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Study

Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle lived in his Windlesham home on the outskirts of Crowborough
in East Sussex for 23 years. When he died there in 1930, his request
was to be buried in a garden next to a writing hut he had built
on the property. But during his life, he actually preferred to write
in the study on the first floor of his home. There he penned several
of his famous Sherlock Holmes works, including The Poison Belt,
in which he describes the view looking out from his study and across
the Crowborough Common to distant Rotherfield.

Oh, and speaking
of Mr. Holmes, he had a nice den too…

Read
the rest of the article

June
21, 2012

Copyright
© 2012 The Art of Manliness