Kipling’s exceedingly nice hideaway
Tucked away on the South Coast... the house where literary giant crafted some of his greatest works
SITTING at the desk in Rudyard Kipling’s old wood-panelled study, it’s easy to see why the worldrenowned author was so enamoured of The Elms, his home in the coastal East Sussex village of Rottingdean, where he wrote his Just So stories. For the view from the bow windows – featuring the village green and pond, as well as the flint walls of the cosy Plough Inn and the old blacksmith’s in the distance – is just so English.
A portrait of Kipling sitting here, surveying a scene that has barely changed in more than 100 years, now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. One can i magine him twirling his famous moustache and seeking inspiration for his novel Stalky & Co and poem The White Man’s Burden, which he also wrote here. If that failed, a walk up to the first and second floors reveals views that take in a windmill, the 13th Century St Margaret’s Church across the road, the South Downs and the twinkling English Channel.
Kipling, also author of The Jungle Book, rented the house for three guineas a week from 1897 to 1902 after discovering Rottingdean when he stayed with his aunt Georgiana. She was married to the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, who lived on the other side of the green.
In his autobiography, Something Of Myself, Kipling says of The Elms: ‘It stood in a sort of little island behind flint walls which we then thought high enough, and almost beneath some big ilex trees. It was small, none too well built, but cheap, and so suited us.’
In the same tome he remembers his time in Rottingdean – with his wife Carrie and daughters Josephine and Ellie – as a tranquil period in his life. ‘Beyond turning out at 2am to help a silly foxhound puppy who had stuck in a drain, I do not remember any violent alarms and excursions other than packing farm-carts filled with babies and despatching them into the safe, clean heart of the motherly Downs for jam-smeared picnics.’
Indeed, he only decided to move on when the owner of a hotel on the seafront organised buses to bring people out from Brighton to gawp at the home of, at the time, one of the most famous people in the country. That, and the fact that, when he enquired about buying the property, the owner, a Mr AHA Bliss, quoted a price so outrageous that Kipling responded: ‘Obviously you think that there is a goldmine under the green.’
Kipling instead sought peace in the East Sussex countryside at Burwash, where his magnificent former residence Bateman’s is now open to the public through the National Trust.
Still tucked behind those same high flint walls, the Rottingdean house, which dates back to 1745, is now an imposing doublefronted home that has five bedrooms, three reception rooms and three bathrooms, and is on the market for £1.45 million.
The present owners, Frank and Marnya Wenstrom, both in their 70s, bought the Grade II listed property from the daughter of the writer Enid Bagnold in 1978.
Enid was the author of National Velvet, which was made into a movie starring a young Elizabeth Taylor, and the play The Chalk Garden. She was also Samantha Cameron’s great-grandmother.
But by the time the Wenstroms arrived, the house was in a sorry state. ‘It was a total wreck,’ says Frank, a retired manufacturer of hotel interiors. ‘Everything was taken back and rebuilt. We didn’t move in for two years and lived nearby in Brighton while the work was carried out.’
An impressive hallway now leads to a new kitchen with oak floor, and large bay window doors open out on to a patio and side garden. There’s a dining room off the kitchen, a lounge, Kipling’s former study of course, and stairs down to the large cellar rooms.
On the first floor a large drawing room overlooks the green, there’s a master bedroom with en suite bathroom and a dressing area that overlooks the garden, and a second large bedroom. The top floor is home to three further bedrooms.
The Wenstroms, who have two grown-up daughters and a son, might be selling the house, but they are not leaving Rottingdean. Ingeniously, they have built on top of the old cellar at the back of the house and incorporated the old maid’s quarters to create a new two-bedroom cottage for themselves.
‘We love the area. Our children grew up here and have moved on so we no longer needed the space, but we never had any intention of moving away,’ says Frank.
‘Rottingdean has everything – pubs, restaurants, shops and its own beach – and Brighton, with its 50-minute train service to London, is just three miles away.’
By coincidence, the house owned by Kipling’s uncle and aunt is also on the market – with an asking price of £675,000. The fourstorey, three-bedroom Grade II listed Prospect Cottage – last sold for £499,950 in 2008 – is a blue-plaque house like The Elms.
Two historic houses for sale opposite each other, separated by a quintessentially English village green. Just so...