THE DUKE AND DUCHESS OF CAMBRIDGE’S main residence is Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace.Kate Middleton and Prince William’s massive four-storey property with 20 rooms is far from your usual city ‘apartment’.
Kate and William live in one of the most luxurious royal residences with their children Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis.
Their London home has enough space for five reception rooms, three main bedrooms, dressing rooms, a night and day nursery, and staff quarters.The Duke and Duchess are not the only royals to live at Kensington Palace, as Prince and Princess Michael of Kent are based in Apartment 10.
The royal couple have been settled at Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace since mid-2017 following William’s decision to leave his role with the East Anglian Air Ambulance.This meant Prince George and Princess Charlotte could attend school in London and it also enabled the couple to increase their royal duties.
The building was built in 1605, and was eventually split up into accommodation for minor royals, with each partition becoming a numbered apartment.Edward VIII once referred to it as an “aunt heap” according to the Daily Telegraph.
After years of neglect and a lack of maintenance, Apartment 1A of Kensington Palace was offered to Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon in 1960.The couple put the palace through an £85,000 renovation after moving in, which is around £1.5million in today’s money.
After their marriage in 1981, Prince Charles and Princess Diana moved into the nearby Apartment 8, on the other side of Kensington Palace.The palace was refurbished in 2011 at a cost of £12million.”We have set out to awake the sleeping beauty of Kensington Palace,” said Charles McKay, chair of the Historic Royal Palaces board.
The massive redevelopment involved more than 100 workers, and included the removal of bomb damage that the palace sustained during the Second World War.There is also a darker side to Apartment 1A, which is said to be the most haunted residence in the palace.
According to Princess Margaret’s official biographer, Christopher Warwick, one incident concerned her housekeeper, Mrs Mac, who saw the figure of a woman in Regency dress standing in the hallway of the Drawing Room.
William and Kate shared a glimpse inside their London residence when they hosted Michelle and Barack Obama in 2016.The Duke and Duchess hosted the former US president in the drawing-room of their home, which had a sophisticated cream colour scheme, with gold accents and pretty floral prints.
