Kensington Palace has a rather interesting floor plan.
Royal fans have seen little of Prince William and Princess Kate’s Kensington Palace home, other than a few glimpses of their desks during Zoom calls and a memorable visit with Barack and Michelle Obama in the palace’s elegant living room (who can forget Prince George’s tiny bathrobe?). But even though most of us will never step inside the walls of their home—known as Apartment 1A—we do know one detail about its unconventional floor plan.
While most of us dream of a luxurious owner’s suite upstairs, it turns out the Waleses—who relocated to Windsor in 2022, but still keep KP as their official residence—flipped the script by occupying a ground floor bedroom at the palace, per OK!
Now, before you start imagining them tucked away in some dark, dungeon-like chamber, let’s set the record straight. Their “apartment” at Kensington Palace is actually a lavish four-story home.
In 2020, royal author Christopher Warwick explained more about the palace’s setup. “All of these royal residences at Kensington Palace are called apartments, which of course makes people immediately think they are flats like the American term for an apartment,” he told True Royalty’s Royal Beat.
“They are not,” Warwick, who died in 2022, noted on the episode. “If you think of Kensington Palace in a way, it is built around three courtyards. If you kind of think of them as being these wonderful red brick terrace houses. Because they are all joined, but separate houses.”
The prince and princess’s bedroom joins a further 19 rooms in the apartment, per Warwick, with the couple occupying the home formerly belonging to Princess Margaret.
Although Prince Harry didn’t comment specifically on their ground-floor bedroom, he did write about visiting his brother and sister-in-law’s newly renovated apartment with wife Meghan Markle in his memoir, Spare.
“The wallpaper, the ceiling trim, the walnut bookshelves filled with volumes of peaceful colors, priceless works of art,” Harry penned. “Magnificent. Like a museum.”
He also recalled feeling “embarrassed” about his “IKEA lamps and the secondhand sofa we’d recently bought on sale with Meg’s credit card on Sofa.com.”
As for the prince and princess’s unusual boudoir, who knows? Downstairs suites might just become the next big thing in interior design.
