Home for Nora Roberts for the past 30 years has been on the top of a hill in western Maryland. When she arrived there with her children, she knew she’d found the perfect home. “I realized I was home,” she explains. “Sometimes you just recognize it.” Over the years her career has taken her all over the world, but she always returns to that hilltop to renew her spirit and create her magical stories.

While there have been many changes to the house, the heart of it is a home that has seen a family grow. The framed photos of Nora, her husband Bruce and her sons, Jason and Dan, which are placed everywhere, chart the years. Early in her career Nora wrote in notebooks and then on a portable typewriter in a corner of her kitchen so she could keep an eye on her two small sons. After her career started taking off, she hired a local carpenter to build some shelves in her bedroom. In the manner of all good stories, the carpenter, Bruce Wilder, later married Nora. “He came and just never left,” she jokes.

Little did either of them know that the home projects had only just started. Bruce built Nora’s third floor office and a tower closet off the bedroom. Later a pool house was attached to the first floor, the kitchen was built out and a library was added on for the perfect nook in which to curl up and read a book. To bring their lives full circle, Nora recently realized the only thing left to add was some more bookshelves.

When she’s not writing, Nora tends to her gardens. She recovers from her annual spring book tour by ruthlessly weeding, planting and mulching, and enlisting her family to help out. Her constant battles with marauding deer have made it into her books and entertained her fans over the years. There’s an herb garden off the kitchen, a hillside of tiger lilies and hundreds of annuals throughout the property, giving Nora ample opportunity to still play in the dirt.