Karen Blixen Museum

Karen Blixen ran a coffee farm here from 1917 until the business failed and she returned to Denmark in 1931, and the book she wrote afterwards, Out of Africa, made the house and the view towards the Ngong Hills famous. The building is a bungalow of stone and timber built in 1912, and it holds furniture, some original to her and some from the 1985 film, along with photographs, her books and farm equipment. Guided tours run through the rooms and out into the garden, where the coffee drying ground and the view remain. The suburb around it, now called Karen after her, has grown into an affluent district. The house is honest about the arc of the story: a failed farm, a broken marriage, and a book written in Denmark about a place its author could not return to.

History

The Swedish engineer Åke Sjögren built the bungalow in 1912, and in 1917 Karen Blixen and her husband, Baron Bror von Blixen-Finecke, bought it to run a coffee plantation. Two years after her death in 1962, Denmark gave the house to Kenya, and it opened as a national museum in 1986, after the film of Out of Africa, which was shot not here but at her first farmhouse, Mbagathi (Wikipedia, Karen Blixen Museum, Kenya).

The main sights

• The 1912 bungalow - the farmhouse rooms with period and film furnishings.
• Farm equipment - coffee machinery and tools in the grounds.
• The Ngong view - the hills from the garden, as in the book.
• Photographs and papers - material on Blixen and the farm years.

When to go

Year-round; the museum opens daily with guided tours included in the ticket. Mornings are quieter than afternoons. It combines naturally with the Giraffe Centre and the Sheldrick nursery on the same side of Nairobi.

Practical notes

The house is small and the tour brief, around forty minutes. Some furnishings are film props rather than originals, which disappoints purists. Photography inside is restricted. Nairobi traffic to Karen can take an hour or more from the centre.

Nearby

The Giraffe Centre is minutes away; the Ngong Hills rise to the west.

Key facts