Windsor gave them a cottage, Tyler Perry put them up in Beverly Hills, and a friend in the Cotswolds has reportedly moved them into the house across the lawn. Nobody in the family is better at being a guest.
Harry and Meghan have always lived best in houses that belong to somebody else. They came back to Britain in late August with Archie and Lilibet, landing at Birmingham after about six years in the United States. They went to stay on the estate of a wealthy businessman in the Cotswolds, and they are still there, give or take a building. According to a friend of the host quoted in the British press, the family has moved out of the main house and into a separate property on the same grounds. The move was made the weekend before half-term, after which everybody went away for the holiday, as families with school-age children do.
The arrangement is known almost entirely at one remove. The host has not been named on the record, and nobody has said what, if anything, changes hands. His friendship with Harry reportedly grew out of military charity work. As a basis for a long stay in the English countryside, that is hard to improve on: a cause, a shared vocabulary and probably a regimental joke or two that no outsider would follow.
The headlines have reached for money, with talk of a budget laid bare. The only budget in circulation is a house-hunting figure reported weeks earlier. It describes what the couple might spend on a house of their own and says nothing about the cost of sleeping on a friend’s land. The move itself shows something more durable than a bank balance. Harry has a habit, older than Montecito and older than his marriage, of living very comfortably under a roof that someone else maintains. In his family the habit has a name and a long history.
Roofs that belonged to someone else
The Sussexes began married life in Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace. In November 2018 the Palace announced that they would move to Frogmore Cottage, a Grade II-listed house on the Windsor Estate, and the following year the royal accounts put its renovation at £2.4m. The couple paid for the fixtures and fittings themselves. The taps and the light switches were theirs. The walls, the roof and the long view across the Home Park were not, and never would be.
That division caused more trouble than anyone in the household seems to have anticipated. In 2019 News24 was among the outlets carrying the criticism of the millions spent on the house, and the argument about who had paid for which part of Frogmore followed the couple out of the country and for some years afterwards. The house itself stayed where it was, as estate houses do. What became of Frogmore Cottage after they left is a separate story, but it shows how royal accommodation works. The occupant changes and the landlord does not.
Grace and favour is house-guesting with a constitution.
The next roofs had no constitution at all, only friends. By one account, the family left a temporary home on Vancouver Island in March 2020 to start looking for a house. In Los Angeles they were reported to be staying, with the infant Archie, in Tyler Perry’s eight-bedroom mansion in Beverly Ridge Estates. Perry is said to have come to know them through Oprah Winfrey, which is the kind of introduction that tends to come with keys. At the time it was unclear whether the Sussexes were renting or simply staying as guests. Neither side said, and the distinction mattered more to commentators than it appeared to matter to anyone in the house.
Then came the purchase. A spokesperson said that summer that the family had “moved into their family home” in July, and the family home was Montecito. It was the first house they had bought together, and by most measures it was the most settled period of their marriage as far as addresses go. It has also turned out to be the house they would rather keep than live in. They are reportedly holding on to it, and DDW has looked separately at the Sussexes’ Montecito house and what keeping it involves.
So the pattern runs as follows. There was a palace cottage, a cottage on a royal estate, a temporary island home, a director’s mansion, a Californian estate they own and now a friend’s acres in Gloucestershire’s general direction. The houses they owned were the ones that generated arguments. Each of the borrowed ones was a period of comparative calm.
Across the lawn by half-term
Anyone who has stayed in an English country house for longer than a weekend will recognise what reportedly happened next. A guest who arrives for a fortnight sleeps in the main house, comes down to breakfast and learns where the dogs are allowed. A guest who is still there after the leaves have turned is offered somewhere of their own. It might be the cottage, the converted stables, the house by the walled garden or the one the previous agent lived in. The offer is a kindness to both parties. Each household gets its own kitchen and its own hours, and nobody has to hear anybody else’s telephone calls through the floor.
In the country, the length of a stay is measured in buildings.
Moving across the lawn is therefore a promotion, and the timing has the tidiness of a family that plans around a school calendar. Plans for a private home base in Britain, and for the children to start school here this autumn, were reported in August. A family settling into a term needs a front door, a table for homework and an evening routine that does not depend on a host’s dinner parties. A separate house on the same estate provides all three while keeping the security and privacy of the larger property, which for this particular family is no small consideration. The estate’s exact location has been kept out of print, and the arrangement depends on it staying that way.
It also leaves the larger question of where they will finally put down roots entirely open. Ynet reported in September that no deal had been signed on a new property. The same report said they would keep their holiday property in Portugal, which leaves the family with Montecito, a Portuguese bolthole and a borrowed house in the Cotswolds. Owning houses in two countries while living in a third is an arrangement more common in this magazine’s readership than outside it, and it is less chaotic than it sounds. The owned houses are kept as assets and the borrowed one is where the family actually lives.
The wish list reported for an eventual English home was specific. It ran to nine bedrooms and a film studio, a combination that tells you a good deal about how the couple expect to earn a living from Britain. The royal reporter Tom Sykes linked them to a sprawling Cotswolds mansion on the market at £12m, and no purchase of it has been reported. House-hunting has reportedly centred on the country near Highgrove. Anyone who knows the area will understand both the appeal and the delicacy of that choice, and neither needs spelling out.
None of this answers the question every headline wants answered, which is what it costs to live on someone else’s acres. The host’s wealth has not been published, his name has not been confirmed on the record, and no rent, contribution or private arrangement has been reported by anyone willing to stand behind it. The answer may be that a cost of this kind is never invoiced. In the circles where people own estates with spare houses on them, the price of a long stay is usually paid in loyalty, discretion and the occasional favour returned years later. Harry has long experience of the first two.
Why the Cotswolds keeps a guest
The Cotswolds have been receiving Californians for some time, which makes the move less strange than it first sounds. Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi are neighbours in Santa Barbara and in the Cotswolds alike, and photographs showed Meghan with the pair at a Cotswolds pub. Oprah Winfrey, whose friendship reportedly led to the Tyler Perry stay, lives near Montecito. Taken together, the Sussexes’ social life on both continents seems to run through people with more than one house, and the right sort of country pub serves as a meeting point between them.
That matters more to a long-term guest than it might appear. A borrowed house in a strange county is a lonely place, however well it is furnished. A borrowed house in a county where friends from home already drink at the local is close to a village life ready-made, with the paperwork left to someone else. The Cotswolds offer that to a family arriving from California more readily than almost anywhere else in England. They also offer a ready supply of friends with spare houses and a long local tradition of not asking who is staying in them.
For Harry there is an older pull as well. He grew up moving between houses that were run by other people, staffed by other people and owned, in the end, by institutions rather than individuals. The same experience is behind his ease in Perry’s mansion and his comfort on a friend’s estate. A guest’s life is the one he was raised in, and most of his life as an owner has involved planning applications, mortgages and newspapers asking about the cost. As an owner he has had arguments.
Meghan’s route to the same place is shorter but no less practical. Her friendships with DeGeneres, de Rossi and Winfrey are with women who are her neighbours on both continents. Hospitality on that scale is a form of currency among people who have a great deal of real currency already, and it is spent with care. Accepting it graciously is a skill, and returning it generously is another.
Sooner or later there will be a purchase. It will probably include a cinema or a studio, and its price will be printed, argued over and printed again. The history of their houses suggests that the arguments will start the morning the conveyancing is done.
For the moment Harry is back in England with his wife and children, a few miles from the country he grew up in. They are living in a house across a lawn from a man who has not been named, and the arrangement has not been put on paper anywhere the public can read it. The friend’s house in the Cotswolds is the first English address in years that nobody has asked him to explain.
Read Next: What Happened to Frogmore Cottage After Harry and Meghan Left
Cover photograph: Simon Dawson / No10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.
