Sleeping in Dylan Thomas' house in Wales

Part time portal, part museum, the legendary poet's childhood home offers travellers an all-access stay in Swansea – and a surreal experience.

Walking up to No 5 Cwmdonkin Drive is murder on the calves. The semi-detached house sits near the top of a too-steep hill, in a middle-class Swansea suburb called The Uplands. To the untrained eye, it might look like just another Edwardian amid many Edwardians, but the blue plaques near the entrance reveal that it's the childhood home of legendary Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, the self-titled "Rimbaud of Cwmdonkin Drive".

After catching my breath, I knocked on the front door and prepared to sleep in my literary hero's bed.

From Jane Austen's country cottage in Hampshire to Charles Dickens' Georgian house in London, Britain is filled with writer residences-turned museums that travellers can tour. But while The Dylan Thomas Birthplace is open for self-guided tours, the real joy is in spending the night where he slept – a part time portal, part museum, all-access crash pad where you can learn about the author while living like him too.

Thomas was born here (literally, in the front bedroom) on 27 October 1914 and lived in the  house for the first 20 years of his life. The interior has since been restored, with every item harking back to Thomas' time. The website promises that "no rooms are out of bounds" for guests, and that's no exaggeration. Guests can cook in the kitchen where Thomas' mother prepared meals on a tight budget, write on the poet's desk, play a few tunes on the pianola in his father's study and even sleep in Thomas' childhood bed. The experience, much like Thomas' writing, often feels surreal.

Overnight stays at The Dylan Thomas Birthplace start at £144 ($191). The home can accommodate up to seven people and guests have access to the whole house. Self-guided visits start at £9 ($12).

I started with a tour from the home's current owner and lifelong Uplander, Geoff Haden. The former structural engineer decided to restore the century-old home from a student boarding house in 2003, after visiting it on the 50th anniversary of the poet's death. The house had suffered years of neglect – with worn-down carpets, tattered windows, crumbling walls – but after receiving and locating items that once belonged to the Thomas family, and furnishing the house in the Edwardian style, Haden opened No 5 to the public in 2008, inviting people to stay the night.

Haden started by offering me a brief a tour, available to all overnight guests. We started in the parlour room, which Thomas references in his work. "Large men sat in the front parlour, without their collars, uncles almost certainly," he writes in A Child's Christmas in Wales. A corner table is dedicated to "Thomas the plagiarist". The young poet was notorious for copying poems from other writers. "Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal," TS Eliot wrote. Teenage Thomas certainly stole, with 12 out of 24 early poems evidently plagiarised.

Haden told me that in recent years, an array of famous faces have travelled to the Uplands to pay respects to Thomas, including Johnny Depp, Lord David Owen and singer Cerys Matthews. The residence recently welcomed a........

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