£1m refit for WillKate Palace: Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will move in to Princess Margaret's former apartment

By Katie Nicholl


Family home: The Duke and Duchess will be moving into Kensington Palace

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge are to make Kensington Palace their family home after the Queen personally intervened to enable them to live in Princess Margaret’s former apartment.

About £1 million will now be spent renovating the lavish four-storey, 20-room Apartment 1A – which comes complete with its own private walled garden – to make it fit for William and Kate.

The couple are not expected to move in until 2013, when the extensive work will be completed.

Many of the rooms are still painted in pink and turquoise, Princess Margaret’s favourite colours, but as well as redecorating, work will also have to be done to install new plumbing, rewire the electrics and remove asbestos.

The cost of the renovations will be met by a mix of public grants and contributions from the Royal Family’s own fortune.

The accommodation, which has been uninhabited since the death of the Queen’s sister in 2002, includes a dining room, drawing room, Lord Snowdon’s former study, Princess Margaret’s garden room, extensive staff quarters and a nursery – which might prove important if the current speculation that Kate might be pregnant turns out to be true.

William and Kate – collectively nicknamed WillKat – currently divide their time between Nottingham Cottage, a two-bedroom home in the grounds of Kensington Palace, and their Anglesey residence.

However, they have been looking for a more permanent base since announcing their engagement in November 2010.

A source told The Mail on Sunday: ‘William and Kate visited Apartment 1A and loved it.

‘Kate particularly adored the private walled garden because she loves gardening, and she just thought the house has so much potential. She also liked the fact it was so close to Kensington High Street.

Fond memories: Prince William grew up in Kensington Palace but will be living on the opposite end to his mother's apartment with his new wife

‘They had seen a state apartment at St James’s Palace, which they also rather liked, but they both agreed they wanted to live at Kensington Palace.’

William had initially proposed living at Apartment 8, Princess Diana’s old home, where he and Prince Harry lived from their births until 1998, and which is currently used as offices for Prince Charles.

‘They did look around Diana’s home where William grew up, but they both felt there were too many memories there,’ said the source. ‘Kate thought it would be too creepy.

‘But she absolutely adored Princess Margaret’s house and thought it had a lot of potential. It hasn’t been an easy process, though, and there was a degree of difficulty getting the apartment back to the Royal Household so that it could be given to William and Kate.’

The apartment is currently managed by Historic Royal Palaces, an independent charity that looks after several important buildings, including the Tower of London and Hampton Court Palace.

But the Queen intervened to persuade the organisation to hand the apartment back to the Royal Household. Historic Royal Palaces uses the apartment for offices, classrooms, storage and exhibitions. Earlier this year when The Mail on Sunday first reported that the couple hoped to move to Kensington Palace, the charity insisted there were no plans to hand Apartment 1A back to the Royal Household.

A senior aide revealed: ‘It has been a long process. There have been months of discussions and a lot of legal work in order for Princess Margaret’s apartment to be transferred back to the Royal Household.

‘This has been to make it fair to the Historic Royal Palaces, which has invested a five-figure sum into making the apartment safe to work in. This financial investment will be compensated.

Historic Royal Palaces also realise that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge residing at Kensington Palace will make it a more attractive tourist destination. Ultimately it was the Queen’s decision and she would have approved it.’ Apartment 1A was opened to the public in 2004, for the first time in the palace’s 300-year history.

An exhibition has been planned for the apartment next year, which will still go ahead – but once it is over, in September, the home will be handed over to the Royal couple. The offices of Historic Royal Palaces will be relocated to new accommodation at Kensington Palace.

It is also expected that Prince Harry, who currently lives in Clarence House, the Prince of Wales’s London residence, will move into Nottingham Cottage.

William and Kate’s private offices will also move from St James’s Palace to Kensington Palace in mid 2012.

The Queen intervened and asked for her sister Princess Margaret's, left, apartment to be handed back to the Royal Household


A spokesman for the Palace said: ‘The extent of the work needed to turn the apartment back into a home is not yet known, but it is expected that it will not be ready for occupation until at least the middle of 2013.’

A spokesman for Historic Royal Palaces said they were ‘delighted that the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have chosen Kensington Palace as their permanent home’.

He added: ‘There is no doubt that their presence will put the Palace more in the public eye and, we hope, encourage more people to come and explore its history.’

It was always the intention that William and Kate would move into a bigger house.

‘Nott Cott’, as their current home is known, is tiny compared with Apartment 1A, with just two small reception rooms, one guest bedroom and a small front garden.

The Duchess oversaw a minor refurbishment to the property this summer, and the couple moved in when they returned from their official overseas trip to Canada and Los Angeles in July.

HIP PARTIES WITH THE BEATLES, THE STONES AND NUREYES IN SKIN-TIGHT BLACK LEATHER

Throughout the Sixties, London’s smartest, most eclectic social set would often gather at Apartment 1A, Kensington Palace.

Then the home of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, it epitomised modish sophistication and buzzed with chatter from the icons of the era.

The four-storey, 20-room apartment had been occupied by the Royal Family for centuries.

At its heart was the large drawing room with its grand piano and kingfisher-blue walls, where some nights it was possible to encounter The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Dame Margot Fonteyn, Mary Quant, Vidal Sassoon, Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland. Rudolf Nureyev would arrive dressed head to toe in skintight black leather, or wrapped in an ankle-length fur coat.

Regarded as Britain’s most stylish couple and the focus of international attention, Margaret and Lord Snowdon, as he became, were, in many ways, the William and Kate of their day. The couple, whose style was described as ‘hip-plush’, moved into the apartment after their wedding in 1960.

It had been empty since its previous occupant, Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria, died in 1939. And it hadn’t been decorated since 1891. ‘It was bombed, falling down, empty and totally uninhabitable,’ said Lord Snowdon. ‘It had to be gutted. The building suffered extensive damage during the war from an incendiary bomb.’


Happy: Princess Margaret in a drawing room in Kensington Palace which is painted in one of her favourite colours


The refurbishment cost about £85,000 – more than £1 million in today’s money – and caused grumbling at Westminster and in the media. The couple spent £10,000 on a modern kitchen, whose central feature was a giant aluminium cooker hood – designed by Lord Snowdon – that was likened to a spaceship.

In 2003, Lord Snowdon denied claims in Government records that his wife had been lavish. ‘I remember vividly that she and I made all the doors together,’ he recalled. ‘She did the veneering and we did them in the workshop.’

The residence was, as one design writer observed, ‘transformed with 20th Century English verve’. But it was not all hip modernity, with the apartment in many ways resembling an elegant 18th Century country house.

There was a spacious hallway with a tiled floor leading to the drawing room, dining room, garden room and study. The reception rooms could accommodate 100 people. The couple had separate bedrooms with a shared bathroom on the first floor. There were more bedrooms on this and the second floor, with staff sleeping-quarters on the third floor and in the basement.

As well as parties, the couple also enjoyed the ‘wonderful peace’ of Apartment 1A, which has its own garden and, beyond it, Kensington Gardens. Margaret once remarked: ‘It’s hard to believe that one’s in the middle of London.’

Later, as the couple’s marriage fell apart, the apartment was associated with much sadness and for many years Margaret lived there alone, until her death in 2002.

Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces, described Kensington Palace – most famously the home of Princess Diana, who lived at Apartment 8 – as ‘curiously feminine’. She added: ‘Many of the princesses who’ve lived here have been mad, sad and sometimes bad. I’m fascinated by the job of princess: duty and pleasure in constant conflict.’

Like his late great-aunt, Prince William will be able to move in only after lengthy refurbishment work as the rooms, stripped of Margaret’s possessions, are once again ‘uninhabitable’.

Whether the nation will begrudge the young couple the money needed to restore 1A to their satisfaction remains to be seen.



source:dailymail