Kensington Palace was Princess Diana’s home for fifteen years. It is now home to Prince William and Princess Catherine and their children. The same rooms. Different people. The history of the building is the history of what the institution asks of those who live inside it.
Kensington Palace was given to Princess Diana as an official residence following her marriage in 1981. She occupied Apartments 8 and 9, which she decorated in a style that royal commentators noted was considerably warmer and less formally institutional than the standard royal interior — patterned fabrics, personal photographs, objects chosen for their domestic comfort rather than their historical significance.
She lived there until her death in 1997. In those sixteen years, it was both the setting for significant personal difficulty and, by the accounts of those who spent time there, a genuine home — warm, busy with her sons and their friends, accessible in a way that royal residences were not traditionally supposed to be.
William and Catherine moved into Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace in 2013, following significant renovation. It is a larger apartment than Diana’s — twenty-one rooms, over four floors, with formal reception spaces for official entertaining as well as the private family quarters where George, Charlotte, and Louis have grown up.
The building contains both sets of memories — Diana’s and William’s — in the same physical space. Whether William, who was fifteen when his mother died in Paris and who has lived in and around Kensington Palace for most of his adult life, experiences the building as a place of loss or as simply home is not something he has addressed directly.
He grew up there partly. He raised his children there. She lived there and died elsewhere. The building holds all of it, as buildings do, without resolving any of it
