Prince Harry and Meghan Markle may have moved their family to the English countryside, but they certainly have not retired from the world of luxurious living.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not sure how long the couple will remain in England. Just yesterday, I read that Meghan would be returning to California in five weeks for “work.” Was it true? Was it rumour? With Harry and Meghan, you can scarcely tell where confirmed information ends and royal reporting begins.
What we do know is that later this month, the Duke of Sussex is scheduled to participate in the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York. Around the same time, he is expected to take to the skies somewhere in Canada for a charity skydive benefiting military veterans and their families.
What wonderfully revealing little itineraries.
Harry and Meghan can wake beneath the ancient beams of a Cotswolds house, travel to New York to participate in a thoroughly modern global conversation, cross the border into Canada and still return to the Californian home and professional world they have retained in Montecito—all with the apparent snap of a finger.
That is what makes their new life so intriguing. The move to England need not represent a rejection of America—or North America, for that matter—nor a retreat from modernity or ambition. It may simply be an expansion: an old English house at the centre of family life, New York as a stage for international advocacy, Canada as another arena for Harry’s veterans’ work, and Montecito remaining part of the couple’s emotional and professional geography.
Their lives now stretch across three highly distinctive expressions of aspiration. New York provides energy, influence and ideas. Montecito offers sunlight, technological intelligence and modern Californian ease. The Cotswolds gives them privacy, history and the incomparable romance of the English countryside.
For years, Harry and Meghan’s life in Montecito represented a particularly seductive vision of modern California luxury: sunlight pouring through generous windows, rooms opening almost imperceptibly onto terraces and gardens, and contemporary systems working quietly beneath all that polished serenity.
Now they are in the Cotswolds.
In this neck of the woods, luxury speaks in an entirely different accent. It arrives through honey-coloured stone, mullioned windows, weathered beams, old fireplaces and floors that have carried generations of footsteps. It is found in an orchard planted long before any of us arrived, a garden wall softened by moss and a view across fields that have remained largely unchanged for centuries.
Harry and Meghan have not necessarily exchanged luxury for simplicity by moving to the English countryside. They have simply moved between two different expressions of luxury—one engineered for modern ease and the other enriched by age, atmosphere and memory.
This couple embodies the idea that there is more than one way to live beautifully.
Is it any wonder they are my muses for aspirational living?
