Mistraldol is the most important house in the Klarion series. While the books do not start at Mistraldol, they return there soon enough. The ancestral home of the Klarions in England, it was built in the 1500s into the side of a mountain in the Peaks District. The house has connections to the realms of demons that partner with the Klarions, and as the house has underground dimensions, there is some question of how far underground the depths go. Most of the nether regions of the house are in questionable dimensions.
There aren’t any houses actually in the Peaks that satisfied my notions of what Mistraldol should be, so I went shopping for houses to transplant. The house that caught my eye was Burghley House.
Burghley House was built by William Cecil, the first Lord Burghley, adviser to Queen Elizabeth the First. Burghley designed the house himself. The pyramid clock tower sealed the deal for me, but the amount of towers and cupolas were interesting enough to bespeak of a house that was grounded in antiquities as well as architecture.
There are some amazing rooms that probably won’t transfer to the Klarion story, like the Heaven Room and the Hell Staircase, which might be a bit direct, given the story. Again, much of the private wing will have to be fleshed out by my imagination, but this gives me a good floor plan.
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I’ll be sketching out individual rooms as needed, but it helps to have this visual information.
There’s a certain point where the ancillary work takes on such magnitude as to render the actual novel an aspect or even an adjunct to a larger process. I think this is a good thing, leading to a rich, deep work, but sometimes you can start to wonder if there’s an end to it.
Having read some of this work in question, I am fascinated — the imagery in my mind is perfectly congruous with these photos.
Having read some of this work in question, I am fascinated — the imagery in my mind is perfectly congruous with these photos.
Then I must be doing something right.
I want to do enough research to lie well, but not so much that I’m not actually writing the project. 🙂
Cath