Admit it. Harry and Meghan Sussex, along with their children, Lili and Archie, are a mini dynasty that we all can’t get enough of. And I mean that word in a few different ways.
For one thing, I think of the Eighties soap opera with Joan Collins and Linda Evans. Why, exactly, is not even clear. Perhaps it is the beautiful clothes, the family complications, the accents, the drama, the sense that just when everyone thinks they knows where the story is going, somebody arrives with another plot twist.
Then I think of dynasty in the royal sense: monarchies, dynastic rules, kings and queens, duchesses and princesses. Who belongs where? Who inherits what? Who gets to decide how the next generation will live?
But then, rather deliciously, my mind wanders into real estate.
Yes, I said real estate. I picture a cosy Cotswolds kitchen, with something bubbling on the stove. In the adjoining sitting room, candles flicker beside enormous coffee-table books on a fabric-covered centre table. There are flowers that look gathered rather than arranged, a comfortable chair by the window, and children’s voices somewhere down the hall.
This is my imagined Sussex interior, of course. But you can see it, can’t you?
Then my mind flicks to summers in Portugal. The light. The Atlantic. Long lunches that somehow become dinner. And the question that makes this particular chapter so intriguing: if Portugal is indeed their choice for another home, why Portugal rather than, say, Malta, France or Italy?
Was it because they knew it would sound regal in print?
I am teasing. Mostly. But “the Sussexes’ Portuguese retreat” does have a certain ring to it. You can almost hear the magazine pages turning.
Montecito. Portugal. The Cotswolds. Put those names together and you have the makings of an aspirational family saga.
And then my mind loops back to Montecito.
That airy, breezy, sun-drenched California enclave where, six years ago, Harry and Meghan appeared to find their forever home. Not a borrowed royal cottage. Not temporary accommodation. Not somebody else’s house. Theirs.
They reportedly paid $14.65 million for a sprawling estate set behind gates on roughly seven acres, with a nine-bedroom main house, guesthouse, swimming pool, tennis court and even a little tea house. It was an extraordinary piece of real estate, certainly—but perhaps the more interesting thing about Montecito was what the purchase seemed to represent. After years of palaces, cottages, leases and temporary addresses, Harry and Meghan had bought a substantial family home together.
And Montecito has its own language. Sunshine through open doors. Roses and olive trees. Bare feet. Dogs wandering in from the garden. Children growing up with California sky overhead. A kitchen that actually gets used. The Pacific somewhere beyond the hills. It is difficult to imagine a more complete visual departure from the formality of royal Britain.
Which is precisely why the possibility of Portugal—and now my imaginary return to the Cotswolds—becomes so delicious.
Because perhaps this isn’t a story about replacing Montecito at all.
Perhaps it is about adding chapters without tearing out the pages that came before.
Montecito. Portugal. The Cotswolds.
One gives them the California life they built for themselves. One offers an Atlantic escape with a European rhythm. And one reaches backward toward Harry’s history while offering the possibility of making something entirely new from it.
Put it all together and you have the makings of an aspirational family saga—one about belonging, reinvention and the wonderful possibility that an aspirational life does not require abandoning the chapter you already love. Sometimes, it simply means making your world more varied. Montecito. Portugal. The Cotswolds. Three homes, three ways of living, one family—and, perhaps, the beginnings of a royal dynasty.
