It was announced yesterday that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are moving from Apartment 1A in Kensington Palace, London, to a four-bedroom cottage in Windsor. According to a royal source, the decision to move was driven primarily by the duke and duchess’s desire to give their three children as “normal” an upbringing as possible. The move means that Prince George, 9, and Princess Charlotte, 7, will no longer attend the exclusive London school of St Thomas’s Battersea, but will become students at Lambrook School, which is a ten-minute drive from their new home of Adelaide Cottage. They’re set to be joined at Lambrook by their brother Prince Louis (4.) The private co-educational school is nestled within “52 acres of idyllic Berkshire countryside.” The cost of sending their three children to Lambrook—which the BBC reports features a “25-metre swimming pool, a nine-hole golf course, an orchard with bees, chickens and pigs”—will cost Kate and William in excess of £50,000 ($59,000) per year. The county of Berkshire isn’t home to just the Cambridge kids’ new school and Windsor Castle but also “Middleton Manor” where Kate’s parents Carole and Michael live. Kate’s sister Pippa Middleton also recently purchased a “beautiful Georgian mansion” in Berkshire along with her husband James Matthews. Pippa’s $17.6 million home features more than 30 rooms as well as a walled garden and greenhouses. Although Adelaide Cottage is on the Windsor Estate and is just a short stroll from Queen Elizabeth II’s home of Windsor Castle (which last year became her permanent residence after the 96-year-old monarch also decided to leave London), the property is a much more modest affair than Pippa’s house or indeed the two other properties that the Cambridges call home. The Grade II-listed cottage was built in 1831 as a home for Queen Adelaide, King William IV’s wife. From 1944 to 1952 it was home to Captain Peter Townsend, who lived there with his wife while he was equerry to King George VI and who caused a scandal when his relationship with the king’s youngest daughter, Princess Margaret, was revealed. One big change for Kate and William is that Adelaide Cottage has no quarters for live-in staff. Instead their employees, including Nanny Maria, will live in separate residences on the estate. However, their decision to keep both Apartment 1A in London and their Norfolk home of Anmer Hall has caused no small amount of controversy, especially in the face of an escalating cost-of-living crisis in Britain and the taxpayers’ money that the Cambridges have already spent renovating these properties. Despite its modest-sounding name, Apartment 1A is spread over three floors and has more than 20 rooms including, according to the Daily Mail, “five reception rooms, three main bedrooms, dressing rooms and bathrooms, a night and day nursery, staff bedrooms and ‘ancillary’ rooms” with “its own large south-facing walled garden.” Over £4.5 million ($5.2m) of public money was spent on transforming Apartment 1A into a home suitable for the future king and his heirs. More controversially still, the duke and duchess’s country home of Anmer Hall cost taxpayers over £1.5 million ($2.3m) in renovations. The 10-bedroom mansion was a wedding gift to Kate and William from the queen. Adelaide Cottage is close to Duchess Meghan and Prince Harry’s UK residence of Frogmore Cottage, also on the Windsor estate, and which was also a wedding gift from the queen. However the property was in a dilapidated state at the time, leading to the Duke and Duchess of Sussex spending $3 million of taxpayers’ money in order to convert it from five separate apartments into a single-family residence. When the couple relocated to California they paid back the $3m in full. In more recent times the Sussexes were leasing Frogmore Cottage to Harry’s cousin Princess Eugenie and her husband Jack Brooksbank, but the couple recently moved to Portugal along with their one-year-old son August. Frogmore Cottage is where Meghan and Harry held a birthday party for their daughter Lilibet, who turned one during the queen’s platinum jubilee celebrations. Next up, Princess Eugenie Debuted a New Tattoo at the Platinum Jubilee—And Revealed Her Son August’s Red Hair!
