I'm sure I echo many fans when I say that it's wonderful that her Greenway House has been restored to its state when Agatha inhabited it.  I saw the news yesterday at Yahoo! about the restoration.  It was such wonderful news that we can tour the villa, right at the River Dart, when it was impossible before (it was still lived-in by Agatha's daughter Rosalind and her husband).  The rooms and landscaping have been lovingly taken care of with (especially to the interiors) special attention to detail.

We will be able to view such rooms like the bedrooms, dining area, drawing room, morning room, and the library.  Touched up was the fresco that was painted in the library by a one Lt. Marshall Lee, a U.S. Coast Guard war artist.  The home was requested by Great Britain's Admiralty during World War II to house the United States' Navy (a certain flotilla) in preparations for D-Day.  The work that was altered included removing the pantry and larder, removing the linoleum, additional 14 toilets, adding stoves to the kitchen, and the painted fresco in the library (Greenway was to accomodate the American officers--other personnel stayed at a nearby home called Maypool--and was to feed around 40 people).


Agatha says this about the library in her autobiography, "In the library, which was their mess-room, an artist has done a fresco round the top of the walls. It depicts all the places where that [United States] flotilla went, starting at Key West, Bermuda, Nassau, Morrocco, and so on, finally ending with a slightly glorified exaggeration of the woods of Greenway and the white house showing through the trees."  When the Admiralty decided to derequisition Greenway, she received a letter asking her if she wanted the fresco removed from her library.  She hastened a reply saying she'd like to keep it as a historic war memorial.  She admitted in her An Autobiography that she didn't know the name of the artist.

Another article on the Web about Greenway's restoration and tour for the public can be found at the Times Online.

Oh, I wish I were able to travel to England and visit Torquay and the AC Museum, see the play The Mousetrap in London, and now visit this white home that is Greenway.  And in case you didn't know ... it has been inspiration for a few novels, too--Five Little Pigs, Towards Zero, and Dead Man's Folly (which included Greenway's own boathouse).  More on that another time.