Karen Blixen Museum Nairobi: Out of Africa & the Colonial Farm House

The Karen Blixen Museum occupies the farmhouse where the Danish author Karen Blixen (pen name Isak Dinesen) lived from 1917 to 1931, managing a coffee farm on the slopes of the Ngong Hills south of Nairobi. Her memoir "Out of Africa," published in 1937, is one of the most celebrated books about colonial Kenya and was adapted into the 1985 film that won seven Academy Awards and made the Nairobi Hills landscape globally famous. The house, bequeathed to the Kenyan government by Denmark in 1964, has been preserved as a museum since 1986 — the gardens, the colonial furniture, the views of the Ngong Hills, and the proximity of a Maasai giraffe or two are all as the photographs suggest.

The house tour takes about 45 minutes with a guide and covers the living rooms, Karen's bedroom, the dining room with its colonial silverware, and the basement kitchen with its original equipment. The guide's account of Blixen's life on the farm — the relationship with Denys Finch Hatton, the failure of the coffee crop, the eventual sale of the farm and departure from Kenya — gives context that the house itself can't provide unassisted. The grounds are well maintained and the location in the Karen suburb (named after Blixen) is leafy and quiet.

The suburb of Karen itself is worth exploring after the museum: the Karen Blixen Coffee Garden restaurant is in the grounds, and the Karen shopping centre nearby has some of Nairobi's best curio and craft shops. The Giraffe Centre is 10 minutes' drive from the museum, making a combined morning visit efficient. Admission is modest; the museum is open daily except public holidays.