I just visited Rudyard Kipling's house Batemans down in Sussex. It was elegant and quintessentially English as well as having a very relaxed family home feel.
Kipling was very keen to buy his Jacobean home as soon as he saw it, which had as he put it been "untouched and unfaked" by Victorian 'improvers'.
The National Trust keeps the house just as Kipling had it, but brings it alive by having beautiful bouquets from the garden in every room.
Lovely to think of Kipling writing away in here. As he was short, he had to have his English walnut chair placed on blocks to be the right height for his French walnut desk. The study is also full of books on India and the East, and favourite authors such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott.
I loved the English leather painted wallcovering in the dining room. Here Kipling entertained such prestigious guests as Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin (also his cousin), writer Rider Haggard and Lawrence of Arabia.
The garden was also very pretty, with topiary, wild flowers, magnificently old trees, a big stream running along at the bottom of the garden and surrounding rolling hills. As the Guardian describes "Every lunch Kipling tramped across his fields, slashing at nettles with a walking stick before returning to his study and sprawling on the oak day bed with a book'.
The garden was also very pretty, with topiary, wild flowers, magnificently old trees, a big stream running along at the bottom of the garden and surrounding rolling hills. As the Guardian describes "Every lunch Kipling tramped across his fields, slashing at nettles with a walking stick before returning to his study and sprawling on the oak day bed with a book'.Images all my own except for the second photograph, www.classictravelling.com
2 comments:
i remember this very pretty house from the movie that was made about his only son dying within days of going to war.
Beautiful, sensual & poetic, I love your blog!
Thank you for nice comment on my blog!
Agneta, the swedish one ;)
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