Last week, Flavorwire put together a slideshow of 15 Famous Authors' Beautiful Estates. It was fun to flip through, although surprisingly few of the homes had my heart burning with real estate envy. Anaïs Nin's California home was very 60s groovy, and I liked Robert Graves's Majorca house, but the rest of the houses fell between "Aggressively Spectacular" (hi, J.K. Rowling!) and "Modern McMansion" on the curb-appeal scale. I think my problem is my imagination is limited, and even if I started to fantasize about magically inheriting a house like Evelyn Waugh’s Piers Court, I would be unable to picture a fleet of pre-paid servants coming with it. And then who would scrub all those bathrooms?

...or, worse yet, what if the house didn't even have modern bathrooms? Some of those really historic homes have codes preventing major alterations, so you might be stuck with pre-20th-century plumbing, and I don't care how beautiful the house is: I love modern plumbing with all my soul.

Labels: Classic books, Houses