This September just past we made our third visit to Brattleboro Vermont. We stayed again in a property that had once belonged to poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling and which is now owned and run under the auspices of The Landmark Trust USA. The house is on a much smaller scale than Naulakha and sits on the same driveway a little way down from that grand, commanding house.
Naulakha from The Carriage House
Here is the description of it from the Landmark Trust USA website :
“When you stay at this Landmark, you’ll awaken wonderful memories. Formerly this was the barn where Rudyard Kipling’s carriage was kept, then it was converted to housing for his staff. This beautiful smaller example of the tones, designs and appointments of Naulakha, accommodates 4, has one bathroom, a complete spacious kitchen, and beautifully landscaped lawn area where you can relax in an adirondack chair or picnic in the shaded backyard.
The View from the Chairs : New Hampshire
From the patio outside the kitchen, there is a stone pathway which will lead you from the lawn area to the barn where Kipling’s horses, Nip & Tuck, were stabled.
The Barn
This property is super comfortable, nestled in among the trees, and banked by perennials. You’ll feel a certain sense of having lived in a cabin in the woods, with comfort.”
Sooooo, comfortable :
The Sitting Room
The Kitchen
Desk at rear of Sitting Room
One of the Bookcases
Kipling still predominates on the shelves but I read and enjoyed :
Who lived here?
Rudyard Kipling’s Vermont Feud
The Vanishing American Outhouse
Rudyard Kipling was keeping a watchful eye on us!
miladysboudoir 
Sigh! My dream holiday destination, never to be experienced, I fear. But that William Nicholson print has given me inspiration for a new collection as we do find these from time to time – then, to house them, I could convert the spare room into a library instead of having bookcases in every room!
Convert the spare room by all means, nilly, but keep the bookcases in every room – ‘books do furnish room’.
Such pleasant memories. The Carriage House looks cozy, especially for just two people, but the splendor of Naulakha was a daily delight. So who lived there? Hawthorne? Melville?
Ha! No. The coachman Matthew Howard lived there. I missed your company from 2012 – the antique arcade shopping malls in Brattleboro were not the same without you two; the climbs up Black Mountain were missing; the local walks (safety in numbers in case of bears) and not least, the chotapegs on the verandah each evening. In fact, when there were no guests at Naulakha we took our drinks over the verandah and admired the sunsets from there anyway.
No, I mean on the cover of the New England Houses book. You ask Who Lived Here? And I must know!
Oh! I see. Quickly popped over to Amazon.com (copies for 0.01 cents) and there it reminded me :
“Dust jacket notes: “This is a loving memorial – in text and pictures – to thirteen New England houses and the persons who lived in them. Some are magnificent architectural showpieces, like Gore Place in Waltham, Mass., and the John Brown House in Providence, while others are modest clapboard structures that housed gentler, and often more famous ersonalities. But all of them are valued legacies from the American past.” The houses include: Adamses at Quincy, MA; Louisa May Alcott at Concord, MA; Bishop Berkeley at Whitehall, Newport, RI; Anne Bradstreet in North Andover, MA; John Brown at Providence, RI; Emily Dickinson at Amherst, MA; Christopher Gore at Waltham, MA; Emerson, Hawthorne at The Old Manse, Concord MA; Sarah Orne Jewett at South Berwick, ME; Longfellow at Craigie House, Cambridge, MA; Lowell’s Elmwood in Cambridge, MA; Maria Mitchell on Nantucket Island, MA; Paul Revere House in Boston, MA.”
I have now done Dickinson, Alcott, Jewett and a Longfellow house in Portland not the Cambridge one. Many of these writers are not familiar to me. More posts to follow! (Probably from Devon where we are off on Saturday – it’s all go!)
I just realised that Kipling wasn’t in the book and neither were Harriet Beecher Stowe and (surely the big daddy of them all?) Mark Twain.