The royal home William and Kate love more than any palace, and the con man who once owned it

Of all the grand residences Prince William and Princess Kate could call home, the one they love most is a quiet Georgian house in the Norfolk countryside. Anmer Hall is where they sheltered through lockdown and where Kate reportedly retreated to heal during the hardest year of her life. It’s the very image of a peaceful family retreat. Yet the story of how this house came into royal hands runs through bankruptcy courts and one of the most notorious fraudsters in British history. Here’s the surprising tale of Anmer Hall.

Anmer Hall was once owned by one of Britain’s most notorious con men

Here’s the twist almost nobody knows about William and Kate’s tranquil family home. According to History Hit, the Anmer Hall estate was bought at auction in 1896 for £25,000 by Ernest Terah Hooley, a famous serial fraudster, shortly before the first of his bankruptcies. The future King Edward VII, then the Prince of Wales, had wanted the property himself, and ultimately acquired it from Hooley at cost in 1898. It then became part of the Sandringham Estate. So the serene house where a future king now raises his children passed into royal hands only because a Victorian swindler needed to offload it.

Anmer Hall was built in 1802, on the bones of a medieval village

Anmer Hall is a handsome Georgian country house, built around 1802, with a charming red-and-brown brick facade of 13 bays and dormer windows in the attic. But the ground it sits on is far older. The official Historic England record notes that the Coldham family, who held the manor through the 18th and early 19th centuries, built the present hall and created the park around it. It’s on land that still bears the earthwork remains of the medieval village of Anmer, now a protected scheduled monument. The little village church of St Mary stands close to the house to this day.

Anmer Hall sits a stone’s throw from where the royals spend Christmas

Part of Anmer Hall’s appeal is its location. It’s part of the roughly 20,000-acre Sandringham Estate, which has been connected to the royal family since 1862, and it sits just a short drive from Sandringham House itself, the country home where King Charles and Queen Camilla host the family’s famous Christmas gatherings. When a former royal correspondent described the appeal to the BBC, he put it memorably: the house was, he said, “close to Grandma, but not too close.”

Anmer Hall was the late Queen’s wedding gift to William and Kate

After William and Kate married in 2011, Queen Elizabeth II gave them Anmer Hall as a wedding gift, as widely reported including by the BBC. Before it became theirs, the house had been leased over the decades to a colourful succession of tenants, including the Duke and Duchess of Kent from 1972 to 1990, and later Hugh van Cutsem, a close friend of King Charles, whose sons are now godfathers to two of William and Kate’s children. William and Harry had themselves visited the house as boys during the van Cutsem years, so for William, moving in was, in some ways, a return.

William and Kate spent millions making it their own

The couple had the home refurbished before moving in, which cost around $2 million, according to Town & Country. The work included a new roof, a new kitchen, a conservatory, a complete internal redecoration, and an extensive tree-planting program for privacy. The couple moved in properly in 2015, around the birth of Princess Charlotte, and it became their main family base while William worked as an air ambulance pilot in the region. Vanity Fair reported that they moved to Anmer Hall to “create a cocoon of normalcy” for their young children.

The Queen reportedly couldn’t understand their favourite room

One of the most charming glimpses of family life at Anmer Hall concerns the kitchen, where William and Kate are said to spend much of their time. As The Week reported, citing a royal insider, the late Queen “couldn’t get her head around” the couple socializing in their kitchen when she first visited, because, in her mind, that was where the kitchen staff worked. It’s a little detail that shows the gulf between old royal formality and the more relaxed family life William and Kate have tried to build.

Inside Anmer Hall’s fortress of privacy, complete with a no-fly zone

The Wales family guard their Norfolk life fiercely, and the house has been turned into something of a privacy stronghold. As the BBC reported, after Princess Charlotte’s birth, police in the nearby village distributed letters asking the media not to harass the couple, who they said had “a more than reasonable expectation of privacy” on the estate. Thousands of trees were planted to screen the house from long lenses, and a temporary no-fly zone was put in place to deter aerial intrusion.

Norfolk is where William says he feels truly at home

For all its history, Anmer Hall’s deepest significance to William is emotional. As Marie Claire reported, he has spoken about how much Norfolk means to him and Kate, describing it as feeling like “home,” and crediting the work his late grandfather Prince Philip did on the Sandringham Estate. William said, “For me, coming here and now living here, everything that he’s done has led up to Catherine and I feeling that this is a part of the country we want to be in. We love this area, it feels like home, and that’s because of what he’s created.”

Anmer Hall became the place where Kate reportedly healed

The house took on a new emotional weight in 2024. As ABC News reported, the family spent time at Anmer Hall as the Princess of Wales recovered following her abdominal surgery early that year, before her cancer diagnosis was made public. Through the most frightening and scrutinized chapter the couple have faced, they reportedly turned to their warm, inviting Norfolk house. For a home that first came to the royal family as a swindler’s cast-off, Anmer Hall has become something quite meaningful: the place where the future king and queen go to be a family, and to heal.

For all the grandeur the Wales family will one day inherit, this modest Georgian house in the Norfolk countryside, with its tree-screened privacy, seems to be the one they love most.

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