Harry and Meghan have gone to Britain for an extended stay and kept their Montecito house, leaving an estate the internet revalues weekly in the care of a bank loan, a rumour and some chickens.
I keep returning to the chickens. Of everything reported when Harry and Meghan left California this summer, the detail I can’t shake is the poultry. NBC News, reporting that the couple had arrived in Britain for an “extended” stay six years after their royal exit, noted that the chickens remained in Montecito. A spokesperson declined to say where the family would live in Britain, citing privacy and security, which is entirely reasonable. Nobody declined to say where the chickens would live.
Admittedly, this is a small thing to fix on. Still, a family that leaves its chickens behind has not quite closed the door. The house they are minding deserves a proper look, both as a home and as an asset, because for six years it has mostly been discussed by people guessing.
Bought Without a Name on the Door
The couple spent the first months after stepping back in January 2020 at Tyler Perry’s estate, which is a very Hollywood way to be between addresses. Then, on 9 June 2020, according to Santa Barbara County records, a company called Rockbridge LLC bought a 7.38-acre estate in Montecito for $14.65m. Neither Sussex name appeared on the paperwork. Reporting at the time traced the buyer to a trust with a deliberately opaque name, sharing a mailing address with the offices of Meghan’s longtime business manager. In California, privacy is something your lawyers draft before you move in.
The seller was a company tied to the Russian investor Sergey Grishin, who had previously owned the nearby house known as the Scarface mansion. The estate had been on the market for five years. Jason Streatfeild, a broker at Douglas Elliman, has said it was first listed in 2015 at $34.5m. Whatever happened over those five years, the price that closed was a long way below the first ask.
In 2020 it was understood that the then Prince of Wales, now the King, had not helped with the purchase. The house is theirs in the plainest sense. The main house was reported that year to have nine bedrooms and 16 bathrooms. Its floor area depends on who is doing the counting, and the counts differ by several thousand square feet, which tells you how few people have been inside with a tape measure.
It is also, for a famous house, remarkably little seen. The Montecito house in the couple’s 2022 Netflix series was a different property altogether, because they did not film at their own. A spokesperson said in the summer of 2020 that they had moved into their “family home” that July, asked for privacy, and largely got it.
Money at a Summer Rate
Here the story becomes, for me, more interesting than the bathrooms. Three days after the purchase, county records show, Rockbridge LLC took out a $9.52m adjustable-rate loan from City National Bank. The rate starts at 2.49 per cent and can rise as high as 7.49 per cent when it resets in July 2030.
Most of the price, in other words, was borrowed. That is how a great many sensible people buy expensive houses, royal or otherwise, and it changes the arithmetic of everything that follows. Whatever the house has gained or lost since 2020 lands on the owner’s slice, not on the bank’s. A loan taken out in the summer of 2020 at a rate beginning with a two is the sort of thing owners mention with the quiet satisfaction of someone who bought an umbrella before the forecast changed.
Whether the loan still stands as first recorded is a matter between the couple and their bank. Mortgages are refinanced and repaid all the time without anyone telephoning the newspapers. As registered, though, the loan gives the house a calendar of its own, and the date that matters on it has nothing to do with royal birthdays or school terms.
There is also the matter of the rest of the reported running costs, which have been totted up in print with an enthusiasm that tends to say more about the people doing the adding than about the household paying. None of those sums has come from the couple. I will leave them where they are.
A Number Nobody Will Sign
Somewhere along the way, the house acquired a price tag it never asked for. The figure that circulates is about $29m, passed from property sites to gossip columns with “reportedly” trailing behind it like a dog on a long lead. No appraisal, listing or sale stands behind it. If it were true, the house would have roughly doubled in value in five years.
The wider market has been a good deal calmer. Realtor.com’s data puts Montecito’s median list price up 36 per cent between May 2019 and December 2025. That is a respectable rise, but a long way short of the doubling the rumour implies.
A median is a blunt instrument for an estate of this kind, admittedly. Trophy houses do not move in step with the rest of the town, in either direction. A buyer who wants seven acres in Montecito with privacy already built into the deeds is not comparing it with the bungalow down the road. That cuts both ways. A house bought below its first ask in a quiet year could be worth a good deal more now, or it could simply have been bought at the price the market was prepared to pay. Until somebody writes a cheque, a valuation is a conversation.
Jason Streatfeild has said that every broker wants that listing. For now there is no listing to want.
The other thing a valuation leaves out is weather. In January 2023, Santa Barbara County’s emergency office told Montecito residents to “leave now”. Anyone who owns property there knows that message is part of the price, whatever the number on the internet says.
Holding From a Distance
This summer’s move has turned the house into the question it had not quite been before: what you do with a California estate when the family is living somewhere else for a while.
The answer, so far, is to keep it. TMZ reported in August that the couple are keeping their Southern California house and still regard the British move as “temporary”. British press reports place the new home in a non-royal residence, possibly in the Cotswolds. The couple have not said so, and their spokesperson has been explicit that they will not say where they are.
Holding is the unglamorous choice and, in property, often the clever one. Selling would mean crystallising a gain or a loss on a house whose value nobody can agree on, and giving up a loan whose rate looked enviable the moment it was signed. Letting it would mean strangers in the bedrooms of the most photographed couple never photographed at home. Keeping it costs money, but it keeps every option open, including the obvious one of coming back.
There is a family dimension here I will not pretend to read. Plenty of anonymous voices have offered views this autumn on Harry, his brother and his father. None of them has put a name to it. What can be said on the record is narrower and more useful: the King became king in September 2022, the Prince of Wales is his heir, and the Duke of Sussex has chosen, for now, to live nearer to both of them. A house six thousand miles away is a useful thing to own when you are trying something new.
What Stays in Montecito
On paper, then, the asset looks like this. A company bought the estate in June 2020, a bank lent most of the money, the rate holds until the end of the decade, and the only valuation in wide circulation belongs to nobody. As a house, it remains largely unseen, which was the point of buying it. The same quietness that has kept the photographers out has also kept out the appraisers, and the internet has filled the space with arithmetic.
I suspect the Sussexes are more relaxed about this than their commentators. Owning a house you are not living in is perfectly normal for people with more than one country in their lives. The British have done it with Scottish shooting lodges and Irish rectories for centuries. Keeping a place warm for your return is an old habit of old money, and it rarely makes the papers unless the owners are famous.
As of the last report, the chickens are still in Montecito, keeping the seat warm.
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Cover photograph via the Daily Express.
