A house from the 1770s with a ballroom, a pond, a tennis court and eight bedrooms, set in 4,800 acres of Windsor Great Park, and the heir to the throne is the tenant.
Renting Forest Lodge is the cleverest thing the Prince and Princess of Wales have done with a house. They could have had almost any address in England. They took one with a landlord, a repairing clause and an open-market rent, and that arrangement suits them better than a deed would.
The milestone now doing the rounds belongs to the magazines. The family moved over the children’s half term last autumn, having set themselves the target of being in by Bonfire Night. A year on, the coverage has settled into tours of rooms nobody outside the family has seen and a dollar sum for a house that is not for sale. That sum is a guess; the lease is a matter of record.
Forest Lodge belongs to the Crown Estate, and when the family arrived, the plain consequence reported in Hello! was that William and Kate pay rent. Everything interesting about the place follows from that.
A house used to tenants
Forest Lodge was Holly Grove first. It dates to the 1770s and came into the Crown Estate’s hands in 1829. Until 1937 it was the official residence of the Deputy Ranger of Windsor Great Park, a title that sounds like a walk-on part in a costume drama and came with a very good house. Grade II-listed, eight bedrooms, a ballroom for receiving people and a tennis court for getting rid of them: it was built for a family that entertains and then closes the door.
Then came the decades that matter to the argument. According to the Crown Estate’s briefing to the Public Accounts Committee, Queen Elizabeth II returned the property to the Crown Estate in the early 1990s, and it has been let on the open market ever since. For thirty-odd years one of the best houses in Berkshire was simply a rental, available to whoever met the terms. The heir arrived as the latest in a line of tenants, which is a far easier entrance than arriving as an owner.
The handover drew some noise. Fox News carried an anonymous claim that two families had been told to move out, and the same Fox News report gives the official understanding that no eviction notices were served and that the tenants moved to similar or better housing.
The family came from Adelaide Cottage in Home Park, their Windsor base since August 2022. They also keep Anmer Hall in Norfolk and Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace. Royal property is a patchwork of arrangements, and Sandringham is a story of its own. Forest Lodge is the first of their houses to be described as the one they mean to stay in.
Paying the going rate
The terms are almost defiantly ordinary. The Crown Estate describes a 20-year Common Law Tenancy at an open market rent, subject to the standard Landlord & Tenant repairing obligations. The wording appeared in Hello! alongside the names of the advisers: Hamptons and Savills valued the house for the Crown Estate, and Knight Frank acted for the Waleses.
The Crown Estate told MPs that William made the approach himself. After discussions with the Royal Household, its commissioners were asked to consider the lease as the couple’s “primary private residence”. Both sides took independent legal and property advice. This is how anyone rents a large listed house from a careful landlord, down to the agents.
The National Audit Office put the rent at a little over £307,000 a year when it reported in June. Kensington Palace has said the couple are funding the move privately and paying market rent. That is the figure people repeat at dinner. The more useful thing to repeat is the arrangement just over a mile away.
The audit office’s investigation followed the Public Accounts Committee’s inquiry of autumn 2025, which began with correspondence about Royal Lodge. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, who was still living at Royal Lodge when the Waleses moved into Forest Lodge, is among the family members with a peppercorn agreement, paying the Crown Estate a nominal rent. Set beside that, an open-market rent paid privately reads less like an expense than like a position.
The landlord did its share as well. According to the National Audit Office, the Crown Estate spent close to £400,000 refurbishing Forest Lodge before the family moved in, in line with its responsibilities as landlord. That is what a freeholder does before a long let, and the Crown Estate’s profits go to the Treasury.
A market rent is the cheapest privacy money can buy.
A forever home with an end date
“Forever home” is a label the press supplied. The house has been reported as the place the family intends to live when William and Catherine become King and Queen, and the couple have never used the phrase on the record. The Crown Estate’s own word is drier: non-assignable. The lease began on 5 July 2025, cannot be handed on, and runs into 2045.
Some will call that precarious. It looks more like good housekeeping. A tenancy with a fixed term and published terms answers in advance every question a committee might ask about who owns it, who valued it and who pays. The Crown Estate owns it, two firms whose names are on the papers valued it, and the tenants pay the going rate for as long as the lease says and no longer. In May the Land Registry recorded the Prince and Princess as owners of the Forest Lodge lease, which is as close to owning the house as they need to come.
Ownership brings its own entanglements, and the Windsors know them better than most. William has held the Duchy of Cornwall since his father became King in 2022, so he hardly needs another estate to manage. What he needed was a family house for three children and a dog called Orla, at a sensible distance from the castle, on terms that could be read aloud in Parliament without anyone wincing. Forest Lodge, with its ballroom and its pond, is that house.
The anniversary pieces will keep coming, each with a fresh guess at the value. None of them changes the paperwork. When the lease comes up, the landlord will still be the Crown Estate. The tenant may by then be King.
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Cover photograph via Wikimedia Commons.
