Inside Forest Lodge: William, Kate and the Children Celebrate Their First Christmas in the Most Magical and Surprisingly Cosy Royal Home You’ve Never Heard Of.
Somewhere deep in the frosted heart of Windsor Great Park, hidden from drones, dog-walkers and even most courtiers, stands Forest Lodge, the Wales family’s brand-new private Christmas hideaway. And this year, for the first time ever, the Prince and Princess of Wales have ditched the traditional Sandringham circus to spend the festive season entirely in their own four walls. No walk to St Mary Magdalene church with the extended Firm, no awkward small-talk over turkey with distant cousins, just William, Kate, George, Charlotte and Louis creating their own traditions in a house that insiders are already calling “the warmest royal residence in centuries”.
The move itself was a masterstroke of stealth. While the world was busy dissecting Meghan’s latest podcast and Andrew’s latest headlines, the Waleses quietly completed the purchase of Forest Lodge in late October, a sprawling yet understated 19th-century hunting lodge that had languished on the Crown Estate books for decades. Tucked behind ancient oaks and a mile-long private drive, it’s only five minutes from Adelaide Cottage but feels like another world. The exterior is classic red-brick Victorian, ivy-clad and storybook-perfect, but step inside and you’re hit with something entirely new for the royals: Kate Middleton’s unfiltered, Pinterest-come-to-life vision of cosy family living.
Gone are the echoing corridors and ancestral gloom of Kensington Palace’s Apartment 1A. Forest Lodge has been transformed in a whirlwind eight-week renovation overseen by Kate herself and her favourite British designers. The result? A house that looks like it was lifted from a Nancy Meyers film and plonked in the English countryside: buttery cream walls, wide oak floorboards, fireplaces roaring in every room, and the kind of lived-in luxury that makes you want to kick off your shoes and stay forever.
The heart of the home is the kitchen-family room, a 60-foot open-plan space with exposed beams, two AGA stoves (one sage green and duck-egg blue), and a 14-foot Christmas tree that George and Louis helped choose from the Windsor estate sawmill. Kate has gone full Scandinavian hygge: sheepskin rugs everywhere, dried orange garlands looping from the rafters, and mismatched vintage china stacked on open shelves. A source who visited last week whispered, “It smells like cinnamon, pine and fresh bread. You walk in and immediately feel your shoulders drop. Even the corgis looked relaxed.”
The children’s touches are everywhere. Charlotte, now 10 and with an eye for aesthetics that rivals her mother’s, personally arranged the fairy lights along the staircase and chose the mantelpiece advent calendar. George, 12, has claimed the library nook under the stairs as his “reading den”, complete with a mini tree decorated solely in Harry Potter ornaments. Louis, ever the chaos agent, insisted on a second tree in the playroom, this one upside-down from the ceiling “because it’s funnier that way”, and somehow Kate let him win.
The décor is deliciously unfussy but quietly expensive. Velvet sofas in burnt amber and forest green, hand-blocked wallpapers by Lewis & Wood, and an enormous Welsh dresser painted in Farrow & Ball’s “Verdigris Green” groaning under Kate’s growing collection of Emma Bridgewater pottery. In the dining room, a 16-foot refectory table is already laid for Christmas Day: antique silver candelabras, plaid napkins, and place cards written in Charlotte’s best handwriting. Above the fireplace hangs a new family portrait taken by Kate herself, the five of them in matching cream knits, laughing on the back terrace with the dogs in mid-zoomies.
Traditions old and new are being woven together. Christmas Eve will see the children hanging their stockings on the inglenook fireplace (Louis’s is predictably the biggest, followed by a midnight dash to the local church for a candlelit carol service. Christmas morning kicks off with cinnamon buns and hot chocolate in pyjamas, presents opened in the snug while the fire crackles, and then a long walk through the private woods where William has promised the children they can choose next year’s tree. Lunch is a relaxed affair cooked by Kate and William themselves: turkey with all the trimmings, but also a vegetarian Wellington for George and Louis’s requested chocolate Yule log that he’s been practising with Nanny Maria since November.
The guest list is tiny and intimate: Carole and Michael Middleton, Pippa, James and their families, plus Uncle James Middleton with baby Inigo. No aides, no protection officers at the table, just family. One sweet detail: every place setting has a tiny envelope containing a handwritten memory from the past year, a tradition Kate borrowed from her own childhood Christmases in Bucklebury.
Even the dogs have their own stockings: Orla the cocker spaniel and two new additions. Louis has apparently already hidden dog biscuits in William’s Wellington boots “for Santa Paws”.
For a couple who have spent 14 Christmases balancing royal duty with private life, this feels revolutionary. A close friend says William has never been more relaxed: “He keeps saying, ‘This is what normal feels like.’ Kate’s in her absolute element; she’s been baking for weeks and has fairy-light-induced insomnia because she keeps adding more.” Another source adds, “After everything they’ve been through, cancer, the relentless headlines, the children growing up so fast, they just wanted one Christmas that’s completely theirs. Forest Lodge is their sanctuary.”
As the first snowflakes of the season begin to fall over Windsor this week, the Waleses are lighting the candles, turning up the Christmas playlist, and shutting the gates on the world. Somewhere inside those ivy walls, five stockings hang by the fire, three children are probably arguing over who gets to put the star on the tree, and the future King and Queen are stealing a quiet moment on the sofa, watching the flames and knowing they finally have the one thing money can’t buy: a real home for Christmas.
Merry Christmas from Forest Lodge, where the royals are, for once, just a normal family in (very stylish) jumpers.
