It’s almost enough to make one feel sorry for the Duke of York. Renovations on his new home, the Royal Lodge, are slipping behind schedule, costs are escalating beyond £3m, and, to make matters worse, he can’t seem to get shot of his old place.
Moving into the Queen Mother’s country house at Windsor — she died there in March 2002 — is proving particularly troublesome for Prince Andrew.
A year ago he had to pay £1m for a 75-year lease on the lodge, which comes with 100 acres in Windsor Great Park, a pool and its own chapel.
By contrast, the Prince of Wales was not made to pay when he took over Birkhall, another of the Queen Mother’s properties, and nor was the Earl of Wessex when he moved into Bagshot Park five years ago.
It wouldn’t matter so much if the second leg of Andrew’s property dealings had gone to plan, but his intention of selling his marital home, Sunninghill Park, has been repeatedly thwarted.
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The reshuffle of royal homes after the death of the Queen Mother should have been lubricated by a rising property market. But after at least a year of discreet attempts to sell Sunninghill, it has not budged. Now, to meet the rising costs of modernising his grandmother’s property, he has reportedly had to take out a mortgage on the house that has dogged him for years.
Ever since the Queen gave the 12-bedroom mansion as a £5m wedding present to the Duke and Duchess of York, it has served as a metaphor for royal dysfunction and excess.
The mansion was conceived in 1987, the year of the notorious television game show, It’s a Royal Knockout, in which the younger generation of the royal family crossed the line from informality to soap opera.
The short history of Sunninghill Park since would defy the inventiveness of even the most Panglossian estate agent. Within five years, the royal couple had split amid revelations in the tabloid press of the duchess’s fondness for having her toes sucked by her financial adviser.
She had not left for good: her initial financial difficulties and the Yorks’ devotion to their daughters, princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, ensured that despite being divorced, the couple have often lived there at the same time.
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Palace sources emphasised last week that a sale, which could raise in the region of £10m, is still being pursued exclusively through private networks. Yet, in the absence of a sale, upmarket agents are confident that, by Christmas, the prince will have no choice but to turn to them.
Located at the southern fringes of Windsor Great Park, Sunninghill is in one of the wealthiest reaches of the stockbroker belt. Near neighbours have included showbiz stars Sir Elton John, Ringo Starr and Bruce Forsyth. Arab and Russian money has also arrived.
But even by the standards of Ascot and Wentworth, where opulence is achieved more frequently than elegance, the brutal architecture of Andrew’s house is problematic. The ranch-like brick building, with a flick of mock Tudor, was nicknamed Southyork, after the Ewing ranch in the 1980s soap opera, Dallas, and the moniker has stuck.
Its similarity to the out-of-town shopping centres constructed in the same decade may not have been entirely the fault of the architects. Supporters of the Edinburgh-based Law & Dunbar-Naismith partnership point out that they worked successfully for other clients, including the Balmoral estate, the Duke of Buccleuch and the Duke of Hamilton.
From certain vantage points in the five-acre grounds, the lawns and gardens soften the effect of the undistinguished two-storey block. But from outside, the effect is of a harsh brick monolith, as the high, yellowish wall blends with acres of dull roof tiles.
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Critics have found an equally inviting target in the interior, featured in Hello! magazine, and designed by Nina Campbell, who had also worked for Rod Stewart and Adnan Khashoggi. She favoured floral chintz, velvet button-back chairs and mahogany antiques. Gossips claimed a loo-seat played the Star-Spangled Banner.
Whatever the limitations of the look — and some compared it to a four-star hotel — the intention had been to aim high. Initially the Yorks had approached the sophisticated American designer, Mrs Henry Parish II, who oversaw the redecoration of the White House in John F Kennedy’s Camelot days.
Parish had perfected an art of reconciling her clients’ contrary impulses to show off, while wishing simultaneously to be admired for their restraint. She knew how to conceal a television screen behind an 18th-century mirror or an unsightly air-conditioning unit under a trompe l’oeil bookcase. However, according to the late designer, the duchess warned her: “We’re only Number 2: we don’t have much money,” and she was not commissioned.
On one occasion, when asked who was to blame for the bungled look of the place, the duchess was adamant that it was not her. She said: “I’m many things, but I’m not materialistic. I think Andrew wanted to build, that was him and his mother, and I wasn’t fussy. His decision goes.”
Perhaps the Queen Mother got it right when she defended Andrew against accusations of vulgarity by snapping at a detractor: “If you’d spent your life on a warship, you wouldn’t know about taste (either).”
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It is unfortunate that, since then, sneaked tabloid pictures of the interiors of the royals’ private quarters in Buckingham Palace suggest that the trait is symptomatic of a wider family weakness, starting with the Queen’s fondness for Tupperware.
Away from the certainties of historic ceremonial, and the formal decor of the state rooms, the Windsors appear as nervous about style as a British male executive invited to leave behind his suit and switch to a smart-casual dress code.
Now, Andrew is being judged on his taste, and the outcome will make a difference potentially worth millions of pounds. It’s almost enough to make one feel pity.
Additional reporting, Helen Davies