Naulakha (Rudyard Kipling House)
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Naulakha (Rudyard Kipling House)
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Naulakha in 2014
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| Location | Off U.S. 5, Dummerston, Vermont |
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| Coordinates | 42°53′55″N 72°33′51″W / 42.89861°N 72.56417°WCoordinates: 42°53′55″N 72°33′51″W / 42.89861°N 72.56417°W |
| Area | 11 acres (4.5 ha) |
| Built | 1892 |
| Architect | Henry Rutgers Marshall |
| Architectural style | Shingle Style |
| NRHP reference # | 79000231 |
| Significant dates | |
| Added to NRHP | April 11, 1979 |
| Designated NHL | November 4, 1993 |
Naulakha, also known as the Rudyard Kipling House, is a historic Shingle Style house on Kipling Road in Dummerston, Vermont, a few miles outside Brattleboro. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1993 for its association with the author Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), who had it built in 1893 and made it his home until 1896. It is in this house that Kipling wrote Captains Courageous, The Jungle Book, The Day's Work, and The Seven Seas, and did work on Kim and The Just So Stories. Kipling named the house after the Naulakha Pavilion, situated inside Lahore Fort in Pakistan. The house is now owned by the Landmark Trust, and is available for rent.
"Kipling named Naulakha after the book he wrote with Wolcott Balestier, his good friend and Mrs. Kipling’s brother, about a precious Indian jewel, and it is filled with a trove of their possessions." Etymologically Naulakha means nine lakhs or nine hundred thousand being the amount of rupees incurred for the cost of construction of the building.The Mughal architecture of the monument had inspired him during his earlier stay (between 1882 and 1887) in Lahore.
Kipling himself described the building and its construction in his autobiography, Something of Myself:
[In the summer of 1893] there came out of Quebec Jean Pigeon with nine other habitants who put up a wooden shed for their own accommodation in what seemed twenty minutes, and then set to work to build us a house which we called ‘Naulakha.’ Ninety feet was the length of it and thirty the width, on a high foundation of solid mortared rocks which gave us an airy and a skunk-proof basement. The rest was wood, shingled, roof and sides, with dull green hand-split shingles, and the windows were lavish and wide. Lavish too was the long open attic, as I realised when too late. Pigeon asked me whether I would have it finished in ash or cherry. Ignorant that I was, I chose ash, and so missed a stretch of perhaps the most satisfying interior wood that is grown. Those were opulent days, when timber was nothing regarded, and the best of cabinet-work could be had for little money.
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