Calling Apartment 1A Kensington Palace an apartment is a just a teensy bit misleading. It's actually a fat four-storey house in the middle of London, and it has got a very cool 57 rooms plus a large south facing walled garden.
The cost of refurbishing the home, which will form the official London residence of William and Kate just as soon as it is ready, was revealed today to have hit £1m, which palace spokespeople said was due to a combination of much of the work being long overdue, and discovering asbestos on site which has had to be removed by specialist teams.
The annual accounts published today also revealed that William and Kates tour of Asia and the South Pacific last autumn cost £370,000.
So how do those 57 rooms add up? Well, according to the writer Lisa Freedman: "In addition to the main reception rooms, there were three principal bedrooms and dressing rooms, three principal bathrooms, the nursery accommodation, nine staff bedrooms, four staff bathrooms, two staff kitchens and two staff sitting rooms. Twenty ‘ancillary’ rooms included a linen store, a luggage room, a drying room, a glass pantry and a photographic dark room for (previous tenant) Lord Snowdon."
