CALIFORNIA DREAM Harry & Meghan’s £8m family home
Since quitting royal life, the Sussexes have struggled to settle. But with their new £8m home in California they have struck gold
AT LAST, they’ve done something right. After a series of wrongfooted moves to a remote Canadian island and to paparazzi infested Los Angeles, Harry and Meghan have bought a home in Santa Barbara on the beautiful California Riviera.
“The Duke and Duchess of Sussex moved into their family home in July of this year,” confirmed a spokesperson for the runaway royals.
Adds a source close to the couple: “This is the place where they plan to be happy, make good friends and bring up Archie, giving him the chance to play with other children his age.”
With its white sandy beaches, palm-studded rolling hills and Spanish haciendastyle mansions, Santa Barbara is home to many of America’s biggest stars, seeking a respite from Hollywood.
The couple’s friend Oprah Winfrey, who is Harry’s showbusiness mentor and coproducer on a coming Apple TV series on mental health, luxuriates in a sprawling £70million estate in the suburb of Montecito.
Harry, 35, and Meghan will find themselves neighbours with Tom Cruise, Gwyneth Paltrow and Steven Spielberg. Nearby are Katy Perry, Jennifer Lopez and George Lucas. Star Trek’s British leading man Patrick Stewart has long made Santa Barbara his home.
Prince Charles is believed to have helped his son and daughter-inlaw get together the £8million purchase price.
But while little is yet known about the property they bought, it is already clear that it may be the first good move they have made since leaving Britain.
When they first fled the UK in November – initially for a break – the royal couple moved into a rented £12million waterfront mansion on Vancouver Island off the Western coast of Canada.
“It was beautiful, but terribly isolated,” says an insider. “It was a retreat in every sense of the word. They weren’t just getting away from the world, they virtually cut themselves off from it.”
On that secluded island, Harry and Meghan, 39, finalised their plans to step back from the Royal Family and forge new lives for themselves in North America.
While many thought they would settle in Canada to remain within the British Commonwealth, in March they moved to Los Angeles, just one day before the US border was closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The royal couple moved into a spectacular hilltop mansion on a private estate owned by Oprah Winfrey’s friend, movie mogul Tyler Perry. The £24million, 12-bedroom, eight-bathroom mansion above Beverly Hills was their base for four months as Harry and Meghan hunted for a full-time
‘This is the place where they plan to be happy, make good friends and bring up Archie’
home of their own. “While it was a nice favour to them at a very difficult time, Tyler Perry’s house with 18 bedrooms isn’t Harry’s style,” an insider told the New York Post.
“Yes, he grew up in royalty and the halls of Buckingham Palace, but he prefers more intimate homes with character.”
Yet for the couple who claimed to be fleeing Britain because they craved privacy, it was a disastrously naive decision.
If moving to Canada shut them off from the world, moving to Los Angeles thrust them back into the same relentless scrutiny and paparazzi pursuit that they longed to escape. In their four months living in Los Angeles they complained of paparazzi drones repeatedly hovering above their home, and were followed by photographers every time they stepped out to walk the dog or deliver charity meals to the sick.
“This is LA, there are probably 200 to 300 photographers around, they’re really hungry for pictures right now,” says lensman Mark Karloff, who hosts The Paparazzi Podcast.
“If they were out and about, they could expect to get it constantly.”
Former royal security protection officer Simon Morgan warned: “To make the move to LA kind of puts you very much in the spotlight.
“The whole nature of that kind of environment is 24/7. From a protection perspective, it’s not an ideal choice.”
Santa Barbara, however, is a very different sort of town. It’s a measure of the seclusion it affords that Harry and Meghan have been able to live there unnoticed for the past six weeks while enjoying the cosmopolitan city. Meghan celebrated her 39th birthday at their new home earlier this month, and is understood to have gathered a small group of close friends for a “low key” socially-distanced house-warming.
“They have settled into the quiet privacy of their community since their arrival and hope that this will be respected for their neighbours, as well as for them as a family,” added their spokesperson.
SANTA BARBARA is home to tech billionaires, media moguls, daytrading vineyard owners, and countless yoga instructors. Its romance has lured weddings through the decades, from Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh to Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin. John F Kennedy and Jackie
‘To the south dozens of marijuana farms scent the air with their musty fragrance’
honeymooned there. “It’s where Harry and Meghan can relax and be themselves,” says a local.
Their new home is only a picturesque 90-minute ride up the coast from Los Angeles, or a mere 45 minutes by helicopter.
It’s close enough to Hollywood to be easily accessible if Meghan returns to acting, but far enough that it’s not overrun by the paparazzi who stalk Los Angeles.
Santa Barbara is one of America’s wealthiest communities, with many homes overlooking the Pacific Ocean selling for more than £80million.
And while it’s yet to become clear whether this will be their forever home, with their house-hunting days behind them, Harry and Meghan plan to live in Santa Barbara for the long haul.
“They intend to put down their roots in this house and the quiet community, which has considerable privacy,” says the insider. “They have thought about this carefully and researched it well.”
Their new home is expected to have a well-appointed guest house where Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, aged 63, can stay whenever she wants.
YOGA teacher Doria lives in Los Angeles where Meghan was born and raised, but as the coronavirus pandemic raged she moved in with Harry and Meghan at Tyler Perry’s home to help look after Archie, now 15 months old.
Meghan’s estranged father, Thomas Markle, aged 76, lives a mere 210 miles south of Santa Barbara at Rosaria Beach in Mexico. She has rebuffed his repeated requests to reconcile. The Sussexes’ new home is no stranger to British royalty. Prince Charles and Prince William have both played at the luxe Santa Barbara Polo Club. Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Louise was the first royal to visit the city in 1882.
The annual Santa Barbara Film Festival also brings Hollywood royalty flooding into town, joining the many who make it their full-time home.
Harry and Meghan could hardly have chosen a more beautiful location for the first home they have owned together. Santa Barbara is surrounded by California’s wine country, with vineyards rising into the verdant hills that flank the city.
The area was home to the Chumash tribe for millennia before being settled by the Spanish in the 18th century, and by wealthy American settlers following the California Gold Rush of 1848.
The city of 91,350 now boasts hip restaurants, chic boutiques and wine bars galore. But it is not immune to the perils of modern American life. A crazed gunman killed six and wounded 14 more in a shooting spree at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 2014.
To the south, dozens of marijuana farms scent the air with their musty fragrance. And the region is prone to natural disasters: wildfires tore through the region in 2017, and the following year deadly mudslides devastated hundreds of homes. Earthquake faults lie under the city, which awaits The Big One on the San Andreas fault.
With Harry and Meghan’s permanent move to California the question remains: what becomes of their UK home Frogmore Cottage, the Grade II-listed house in the grounds of Windsor Castle that was loaned to the newlyweds by the Queen, and renovated at a cost to taxpayers of around £2.4 million?
After deciding to leave the country, the couple had agreed to pay £18,000 a month towards the Frogmore refurbishment costs, and had hoped to be able to use it for trips to Britain.
But with all the ill feeling detailed in the controversial new biography Finding Freedom – Harry’s rift with Prince William, Kate’s alleged unfriendliness to Meghan, viper-like Palace aides – it may be quite a while before they cross that threshold again.