sanctum

noun

1. A place set apart, as with a sanctum sanctorum; a sacred or private place; a private retreat or workroom.

   “As he descended the stairs, two persons passed him, so remarkably dissimilar in their persons, dress, and carriage, that he could not forbear to look earnestly at them, as forming a criterion of the mixed character of company admissible in such places, and which was to him (with his preconceived notions of the inviolability of the female sanctum) an insuperable objection to such scenes of general resort.”

   “For myself, I had no need to make any change; I should not be called upon to quit my sanctum of the schoolroom; for a sanctum it was now become to me, – "a very pleasant refuge in time of trouble."”

   “A diary, after all, is a sanctum for self-confession.”

   “His colleagues quailed when, in 1986, he first sat on the court as a brash 50-year-old whose experience had been mostly as a combative government lawyer: a justice who, in that sanctum of columns and deep judicial silence, was suddenly firing questions like grapeshot.”