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my favourite room

Guy Lawson’s office, created in an old garden shed in his backyard.Jennifer May

Toronto-born author and journalist Guy Lawson moved from New York City to a four-acre rural property in upstate New York eight years ago, around the time his twin daughters were born, to concentrate on what he does best – writing best-selling non-fiction such as the recently published Octopus, about a real-life hedge-fund fraud, that has earned him praise on both sides of the border.

The 49-year-old self-avowed Toronto Maple Leafs fan and contributor to Rolling Stone, GQ, Harper's and The New York Times edited his book in a garden shed in the backyard that he converted into an office that he refuses to share with his cookbook-author wife, Maya Kaimal. "The joke term for this kind of space is 'man cave,' but this is actually the opposite: a man cloud," says Lawson of his favourite room, whose large windows overlook a section of Canadian Shield, reminding him of Muskoka. "I call it the 'shed,' but it is really a dreamy, light soaked studio that I love beyond reason."

1. The book case

"This was custom built – a major luxury. The carpenter who made the shelves is a real craftsman, so it's a pleasure admiring the precision of their dimensions."

2. The print on the shelf

"My twin daughters are very talented artists, if I do say so myself. This is a painting of a bunny Lucy did at the age of four, and I think it's a masterpiece."

3. The sled

"This is an antique grain scale that my mother gave me to use as a coffee table. It's got wheels and rolls around; it was how they used to weigh grain in the 19th century."

4. The desk

"It has a pulley system that lets me raise it and turn it into a standing desk. Sitting all day every day is nearly as bad for your health as smoking a deck of du Mauriers, so I try to spend at least part of the day standing as I work – like right now, in fact."

5. The desk chair

"It's an Aeron, but even that doesn't save my back and backside, so I supplement it with a pillow my mother gave me that has all of the names of the Canadian provinces stitched into it, allowing me to sit on my home and native land."

6. The monitor

"I need a big screen as my eyes grow progressively weaker with age. If you look underneath, you'll see I have a small statue of the elephant-god Ganesh, which is there, hopefully, to remove all other obstacles to my writing."

7. The red painting

"I bought this wonderful Mary McLean painting from the artist herself in her house in the bush outside Kalgoorlie, Western Australia, the gold-mining town where my late father was raised. She's a wonderful Aboriginal artist who is collected in leading museums in Australia, but she's more than a little amused by the way 'whitefellas' love her work so much. She used the $1,500 I paid for this piece to buy her son a used car."

8. The strewn papers

"Writing a book is a little like waging a war with yourself – it's going to be messy and difficult and there will be no prisoners taken. This is the aftermath of the siege that led to the finish of Octopus. I have to muster the courage to tidy it up before it gets lost by the new campaign I'm just beginning."

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