- 10.30am
- 11am
- 11.30am
- 12pm
- 2pm
- 2.30pm
The tours last around 20-30 minutes. Not only will you hear lots of fascinating detail about Princess Margaret's home, but you will also get taken into private areas where you must be escorted.
I visited the kitchen where there is a huge extraction hood which inspired a hood over an open fire in the James Bond film Goldfinger. The color of the units is literally ‘egg shell’ as Margaret chose the color when she saw her husband boiling an egg. They wrapped the egg and sent it to the suppliers!
In the Dining Room and Drawing Room there is no furniture as it all had to be sold at auction to pay the Government Inheritance Tax. Historic Royal Palaces managed to buy back a few items on display in these rooms. The fireplaces in the Dining Room and Drawing Room came from Victorian houses in the London Bridge area that were being demolished. Lord Snowdon bought them both for £250 in the 1960s but they are now worth £500,000 each.
Do look up in the Drawing Room and notice the nicotine-stained cornices that were once brilliant white. Margaret was a heavy smoker.
Lord Snowdon is a famous photographer and there are copies of some of his work on the walls of the room that was his Study. When Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon divorced she converted the room into her private library and her son Lord Linley, who is a cabinet maker, made the shelves. Unfortunately, the shelves also had to be sold to pay the Inheritance Tax. From this room there is a small opening in the wall to allow you to see into the Drawing Room, and Dining Room in the distance. This opening was used to project film onto a screen in the Drawing Room.
