a writer’s retreat restored...a writer’s retreat restored . rudyard kipling’s revived...

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Story and photos by Pierre Home-Douglas

A Writer’s Retreat Restored Rudyard Kipling’s revived Dummerston home continues

to offer calm and relaxation 123 years later.

VERMONT HAS LONG BEEN a home for famous transplanted writers. From the 1970s to the

1990s, world-renowned author and po-litical dissident Alexander Solzhenit-syn made Cavendish his home in exile after he was expelled from the So-viet Union. Early in the 20th cen-tury, Robert Frost moved from New Hampshire to Vermont seeking “a better place to farm and especially grow apples.” The four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet ended up owning five farms in the state before his death in 1963. Other well-known authors, from Sinclair Lewis to Saul Bellow, have also owned homes in Vermont. But long before any of these writ-ers found refuge in the hills and val-leys of the Green Mountain State, a famous writer—arguably the most famous one in the world at the time—moved across the Atlantic Ocean to make Vermont his new residence. In 1892, British author Rudyard Kipling bought 10 acres in Dummerston, near Brattleboro. Born in Bombay (present day Mumbai), India in 1865, Kipling had spent most of his early life divided between his homeland and England, where he eventually met an American writer Wolcott Balestier, whose fam-ily owned an estate near Brattleboro. Through Wolcott, Kipling met his sister, Carrie, whom he married in January 1892. On their honeymoon, the two stayed with Carrie’s parents at their estate. Kipling quickly fell in love with the Green Mountain State and when they re-turned from a planned round-the-world trip and had a chance to buy property in the area, they jumped at the chance. Kipling and his wife built a rambling,

shingle-covered home they called Nau-lakha (pronounced Naw-LOK-ah), the Hindi word for “precious jewel.” Shaped a little like a Kashmiri houseboat, the house stretches 90 feet in length, with Kipling’s library and office at one end and the kitch-

en at the other. It was in this house that Kipling wrote some of his most famous books, including The Jungle Book, Cap-tains Courageous, and part of Kim and the Just So Stories. “There are only two places in the world where I want to live,” Kipling once said, “Bombay and Brattleboro.” Unfortunately, his American sojourn

did not last. Kipling and his family left Naulakha in 1896 after a family quarrel with Kipling’s alcoholic brother-in-law landed the celebrated author in court in what turned out to be a protracted legal ordeal for the publicity-shy writer. The

house was later abandoned and al-though it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979, it might have languished in a state of increasing disrepair. Fortunately for the home—and admirers of Kipling around the world—the Landmark Trust came to the rescue in the 1990s. According to operations manager Kelly Carlin, the goal of the British-based organization is to rescue histor-ically significant properties that are threatened. “Because of the connec-tion between Kipling and England,” she explains, “Naulakha was the first American building that they invested in.” Unlike preserved homes of many fa-mous writers, Naulakha is not hidden behind velvet ropes or “Do Not Enter” signs. “The Landmark philosophy is to do conservative repairs,” Kelly explains. “You don’t try to make the house new. You restore its use. Then you rent it out, giving people a unique one-on-one experience of actually living in the home.” In returning Naulakha to what it had been like a century before, the

Trust faced a daunting challenge. The house had been abandoned for 50 years, the south foundation wall had collapsed, and a family of raccoons had taken up residence in the home. “But much of the original furniture was there,” Kelly states. “The pictures were still on the wall, the curtains were still on the window. It was

Far from being a roped-off museum display piece, this desk is both part of Naulakha’s history and its current furnishings; it is said to have been the desk at which Kipling wrote The Jungle Book.

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its own little time capsule. The family who owned it occupied the house next door, the carriage house, so they had kept an eye on it. Even though it had been aban-doned for 50 years, not a single window had been broken.” Still, it needed a major overhaul. Many changes had been made. Additions had been built, a big porch had been added, and some rooms had been changed. The restorers managed to find the original ar-chitectural drawings for the home in New York City, filed under “Kipling cottage.” The Landmark Trust also located some 75 letters written when Kipling lived in the house that gave details about the interior of the home. They also had a photograph of Naulakha taken by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, who had stayed at the home and played winter golf with Kipling on the property. Doyle also brought over a pair of skis for his host and the two became the first re-corded skiers in Vermont. Novelist Hen-ry James, who used the same bedroom

“If Kipling were here today he would certainly recog-nize it” says Naulakha operations manager Kelly Carlin of the restoration.” The green exterior paint is an exact match to the home’s original color.

The design of the stone and mortar gateway at Naulakha duplicates the stonework of the home’s foundation.

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where Doyle once stayed, also visited the house. The Landmark Trust removed every-thing that had been added and put the rooms back where they were originally placed. “If Kipling were here today he would certainly recognize it,” Kelly says. “It looks very much like when he lived there.” The billiard table still stands on the top floor, where Kipling loved to play the game, and his roll-top desk stands nearby. Kipling’s large claw-foot bathtub—the only one that “completely met my needs” and where he used to write letters as he soaked in its luxuriant warmth—is also there in the bathroom next to his bed-room. So is the bed that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle slept in when he visited Naulakha, and in a rack in the maid’s room for Kipling’s golf clubs. Much of the furni-ture in the house is original. Each piece, including the bathtub, features a small, discretely placed plaque with the legend “Rudyard Kipling/Naulakha.” Some frag-ile furniture has been placed in storage and replaced by similar pieces. The Landmark Trust had little trouble re-creating the exact exterior color of the house. It was covered in shingles that had been dipped in paint. Once they removed the shingles, the reverse side still had the original color. “We took one to Sherwin-Williams so they could reproduce it,” re-calls Kelly. The color (sage green) is now called Kipling Green.” Although he helped design the home, Kipling was not a flawless planner. He situated the children’s bedroom directly above his study. Apparently the scam-pering of little feet eventually proved too much of a distraction to Kipling so he later had all the floorboards in the room above removed and seaweed stuffed in for soundproofing. When the Landmark re-storers took up the same boards a century later, they found the seaweed still there. Despite the fact that she was Ameri-can, Mrs. Kipling insisted on a formal lifestyle at the home that was more typi-cal of the English upper class at the time. Her husband told locals that he was jeal-ous of people who did not have to dress formally for dinners 365 days a year. Ser-vice people like maids were expected to be properly attired. According to Kelly, this made it nearly impossible to employ locals because few Vermonters were keen on wearing clothes that announced them as servants. Most of the help came from

The windows on the east side of the house afford occupants a fine view of Mount Monadnock in neighboring New Hampshire.

The dining room’s ambiance and furnishings reflect Mrs. Kipling’s insistence on appearances reflecting a formal lifestyle in traditional English fashion.

Kipling’s library appears much as it did during the years he spent at Naulakha; many of the books here be-longed to him.


England, including a coachman—some-one akin to a property manager—who ended up living in the nearby carriage house with his wife and eight children. The home originally had no electricity. Kipling had installed large picture win-dows, which flooded the home with light in the daytime. At night, oil lamps were used. Heat was provided by coal. With no insulation and windows that were far from being thermally efficient, the home’s coal-fired furnace required a ton of fuel every nine days in the winter. Today, the home features electric heaters. Unlike nearby homes—and older Ver-mont homes in general—Naulakha was built far back from the street. This was de-signed to make it difficult for passersby to arrive unannounced. In addition, all the main rooms are on the east (street side) of the home, with just hallways and stair-cases on the west side, making it less likely for anyone arriving at the main door at the back to see anyone in the home. The long, arcing driveway is lined with white pines. Planted as saplings by Kipling, the trees now soar more than 80 feet high and form a majestic entry to the home. As the house is built into the side of a hill, the ground floor on the east side of the house is roughly the height of a second-story building. With the large windows on that side of the house, Kipling and his fam-ily could gaze out on a landscape punctu-ated by Mt. Monadnock, which he referred to in a letter written at Naulakha: “Beyond the very furthest range, where the pines turn to a faint blue haze against the one solitary peak—a real mountain and not a hill—showed like a gigantic thumbnail pointing heavenward.” The road below the house, now called Kipling Road, was a favorite route for Kipling as he bicycled into Brattleboro. The modern-style bicycle with two pneu-matic tires replaced the high-wheeler “penny-farthing” design in the 1880s, and Kipling was a devoted owner of one of the newfangled machines. One day in 1896, Kipling encountered his brother-in-law, Beatty Balestier, on the road. Beatty forced Kipling into the ditch and off his bicycle. Beatty demanded that Kipling apologize for telling locals that his fa-mous brother-in-law had to bail him out financially. Kipling refused and Beatty threatened to kill him if he would not retract his statement. Kipling went to his lawyers, Beatty was arrested, and the

All of the home’s rooms are on the east side and all hallways and staircases on the west side, facing Kipling Road, to maximize privacy.

The house has sleeping quarters for eight people and prices range from $390 to $450 per night, with a mini-mum stay of three nights.

Perhaps not thinking the situation through when planning the house, Kipling situated the children’s bedroom above his study.

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case attracted worldwide attention. By the time it was over, Kipling was thoroughly fed up with the scrutiny of the press and had packed up his family and moved back to England. Today, the house draws visitors from around the world. Read through the guestbook and you will see entries from visitors all over America and Europe. Many people come back for second stays. Or many more. Patrice Champagne has been to the house “too many times to count” since she first started staying there 20 years ago. As head of the Montessori Discover School in Norwich, Connecti-cut, she brings her teachers to a staff re-treat in Naulakha every year. She also organizes an annual trip with five of her friends. Patrice discovered what she calls “Rud-dy’s house” when she was researching a trip to England with her husband. Both were interested in historical houses and wanted to stay in one on her visit over-seas. “Someone mentioned about Land-mark Trust. I checked through their book and noticed that one of their places was actually near to where I lived in the Unit-ed States.” After seeing it for the first time she was hooked. “The thing that’s great about it is it’s beautifully restored and it was origi-nally preserved. Yes, there were changes made but the restoration was excellent. Sure, there are some people who might say ‘Oh, the showers are out of date and this and that’ but those aren’t the type of people who would want to stay here.” She adds, “It’s clean and crisp and the woodwork is just wonderful. There’s a huge expanse of glass. It just has a tre-mendous amount of style and it speaks to who Kipling was; this house has a soul. Even my grandson loves it. My son and daughter-in-law rented the house when they got married. It’s been a part of our family’s tradition for many years.” It is also part of local traditions, too. Every spring, Naulakha is open for sev-eral days and people are invited into the home, where they can sit and listen to someone read Just So Stories in the very room where they were written more than a century ago.

Pierre Home-Douglas is a freelance writer based in Montreal, Canada. He has written articles for various Canadian and U.S. magazines and news-papers, and has also co-written seven nonfiction books, including The Old West and The World’s Greatest Railway Journeys.

Plaster casts of Bagheera and Gray Brother, given to Kipling by Joel Chandler Harris, whose stories Kipling en-joyed as a child, are in the study together with yet another writing desk and chair.


JUST THE FACTS

Dummerston

If you go: Naulakha is available for rent year-round. The house sleeps eight and the prices range from $390 to $450 a night. Minimum stay is three nights. For more information, call (802) 254-6868 or go to landmarktrustusa.org/properties/rudyard-kiplings-naulakha.

The rack of golf clubs in the maid’s room and Kipling’s claw-foot bathtub (where he used to write letters while enjoying a warm bath) are original fixtures.

Much like Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling loved to play billiards in his leisure time and had this table installed in the top-floor game room.

Also in the game room upstairs is a checkerboard and a stash of other board games that visitors might enjoy playing on rainy days.

In the kitchen, a modern-day range hood is concealed within the original, cast-iron hood over the cook stove. The home originally did not have electricity.

a writer’s retreat restored...a writer’s retreat restored . rudyard kipling’s revived...

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