Roald Dahl’s famed writing hut, birthplace of many of his most beloved characters, is quietly sinking and his family is soliciting donations to have it rescued and moved to the late author’s museum. Saving the structure would cost at least half a million pounds. That news sparked some minor outrage this week in Britain, with commentators asking why members of the Dahl family couldn’t put up the money themselves. It could all be a plot point from one of Dahl’s books: a boy’s magic hideout is discovered by adults, who proceed to squabble over what it is worth, who should own it, and how it can best be put to “public use.” (The dippy adults would undoubtedly receive various comeuppances.)

In his recent biography of Dahl, “Storyteller,” Donald Sturrock writes about his first visit to the hut:

He opened the door to the hut and I went inside. An anteroom, stuffed with old picture frames and filing cabinets, led directly to his writing space. The walls were lined with aged polystyrene foam blocks for insulation. Everything was yellow with nicotine and reeked of tobacco. A carpet of dust, pencil shavings and cigarette ash covered the worn linoleum floor. A plastic curtain hung limply over a tiny window. There was almost no natural light.

As monuments go, this one is pretty bleak. At its center is what looks to be a ratty, decaying recliner. Sturrock noted then of the place that “everything seemed ramshackle and makeshift. Much of it seemed rather dangerous.” (Children, as Margaret Talbot wrote about in her piece on Dahl for the magazine in 2005, love the hut.) Yet the public’s fascination with Dahl’s writing hut may have less to do with its particulars (even if they are, like many of Dahl’s creations, so delectably squalid) than with the ideas of sanctuary and creative freedom that it represents. Sturrock quotes from a radio interview that Dahl gave in 1970:

You become a different person, you are no longer an ordinary fellow who walks around and looks after his children and eats meals and does silly things, you go into a completely different world. I personally draw all the curtains in the room, so that I don’t see out the window and put on a little light which shines on my board. Everything else in your life disappears and you look at your bit of paper and get completely lost in what you’re doing. You do become another person for a moment. Time disappears completely. You may start at nine in the morning and the next time you look at your watch, when you’re getting hungry, it can be lunchtime. And you’ve absolutely no idea that three or fours hours have gone by.

How, then, to preserve an idea? It’s easy to read such a full-throated celebration of creative space and make the leap to say that the hut itself embodies that spirit, and to let it die would be to let the spirit die with it. But despite its place as a historical marker and curiosity, I’m not sure that preserving it need be at the top of too many donors’ lists. Wouldn’t public money be better spent giving other artists the chance to enjoy rooms of their own—places that they might one day remember as fondly and centrally as Dahl did, when he explained his writing process to Sturrock: