The house was set in 6 acres (2.4 ha) of grounds with three bedrooms, with an apple and pear tree orchard with two water wells.
[7] Elizabeth Day, writing in The Guardian, described the house as "an oversized cottage with low ceilings and yellow- and rose-painted rooms".
Dahl's widow, Felicity Dahl, said in a 2008 interview with The Guardian that "people have strong reactions" to the house; the film director Tim Burton cried on the lawn of Gipsy House after coming there to research for his film adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
[4] Dahl did not plant the garden himself due to his back pain that lingered from injuries sustained in the Second World War.
[6] A teahouse in the garden was converted into an aviary for parakeets and the hundreds of budgerigars who roamed the countryside during the day would roost there at night.
It was inspired by one that Dahl had seen at Moyns Park, an Elizabethan country house in Essex, the home of his friend Ivar Bryce.
[4] The front lawn of the house has two manhole covers, one decorated with the design of the Queen of Hearts and the other of Ace of Spades in reference to Dahl's love of the card game blackjack.
Dahl told BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs programme in 1979 that he wrote in "A little hut, curtains drawn so I don't see the squirrels up in the apple trees in the orchard.
[8] In 2008 Elizabeth Day, visiting the house for The Guardian, described it as having been unchanged since Dahl's death in 1991, looking like a "dilapidated shed, its paint peeling and faded, its tiny windows dusty with disuse" and that "Everything is in place, exactly as it should be, except the person who made it so".
Most of the space in the hut is taken up with Dahl's green "wing-back armchair" in which he sat when writing, he would also rest his legs on an old suitcase and cover them with a sleeping bag to keep warm.
Dahl wrote with Dixon Ticonderoga pencils on yellow A4 pads, resting on a piece of wood on a cardboard tube.
Valle argued that such myth making negated the important role that his literary editors had in shaping his work for publication.