In 1986, Queen Elizabeth II gave her second son, Prince Andrew, a wedding gift. A bespoke 12-bedroom, 12-b mansion on a 665 acre Barkshire estate, built at Crown Expense on a site where a royal lodge had stood since the reign of Henry VIII. The press called it South York after the garish Texan ranch at the heart of the American soap opera Dallas, with York substituted to reflect Andrews dukedom.
They also called it Tesco Towers because it looked like a supermarket. They called it Dallas Palace and Happy Eater Hall after the roadside catering chains then dotting British motorways. The architect had described it with apparent sincerity as a modern interpretation of a county house. Andrew never personally owned it, never paid rent on it, and never contributed to its construction.
Inside, the entrance hall rose 35 ft to a glass dome and contained the stuffed head of a North American buffalo. The study was lined with fake books carved from wood that concealed a wall safe. The downstairs cloak room featured a musical toilet roll holder that played either God Save the Queen or the Star Spangled Banner, depending on the nationality of the occupant.
And the master bedroom contained a collection of antique teddy bears arranged on a four- poster bed. In 2007, it was sold for 15 million pounds,3 million above its asking price to a company registered in the British Virgin Islands, whose true owner was later identified as Timur Kulibf, the billionaire son-in-law of Kazakhstan’s autocratic president and whose purchase funds were linked by Italian prosecutors and a BBC investigation to a bribery and corruption scheme.
The house stood empty for 8 years, was briefly saved from demolition by a colony of more than 100 bats, was raised in 2015, and was replaced by an even larger mansion that, as of 2026, has never been occupied. The estate where it stood had been royal property since Henry VIII, had served as the headquarters for the D-Day air campaign, and had burned down 3 months before Princess Elizabeth’s wedding in 1947.
The house that replaced it 40 years later planned nothing more consequential than a dinner party on monogrammed China. Today we walk through the demolished royal mansion Queen Elizabeth gave Prince Andrew before it was erased. The estate that would become Prince Andrew’s wedding gift had been royal property since the age of the Tudtor, forming part of Windsor Forest, the great medieval hunting ground stretching across Barkshire that had been a royal possession since at least the time of William the Conqueror. A royal lodge or
house was established at Sunning Hill as early as 1511 during the reign of Henry VIII, who is known to have stayed there occasionally. And in 1527, a glazier named Gallian Hone was paid to carry out repairs to the glazing of the house in preparation for a visit by Princess Mary, Henry’s daughter.
A visit that apparently never materialized. In 1630, King Charles I granted the Sunning Hill estate to Thomas Kerry, one of his courtiers, beginning its long transition from pure royal domain to private aristocratic seat. Around 1633, the estate passed to Sir Thomas Draper and his descendants held it until 1769 when it was sold to Jeremiah Crutchley and the Crutchley family held the estate continuously until 1936, making them the property’s longest private owners.
The house at the center of the estate during these years was a substantial stucco building of two stories with later Georgian additions entirely characteristic of the comfortable rural seats of the English upper gentry. From November 1943 to September 1944, this Georgian house was commandeered as the headquarters of the United States Army Air Force’s 9inth Air Force.
the massive tactical airarm assembled for the specific purpose of supporting the Allied invasion of Western Europe. Lieutenant General Lewis H. Breitton assumed command of the newly reconstituted 9inth Air Force at Sunning Hill on October 16th, 1943, inheriting a nucleus of experienced staff officers from his prior command in the Middle East and absorbing the personnel of the Eighth Air Support Command, which had already been resident at Sunning Hill.
and the headquarters was organized along traditional staff lines with key positions occupied by veterans of the desert campaigns. Within 7 and 1/2 months, Breitton had transformed the 9inth Air Force from little more than a name into what official history is described as the most powerful single tactical air force engaged on any of the world’s battlefronts.
11 medium and light bombardment groups, 18 fighter groups, 14 troop carrier groups, totaling over 170,000 men, and approximately 4,500 aircraft by D-Day. The service command headquarters for this force relocated in mid- November 1943 to newly constructed quarters immediately across from the Ascot Racecourse, directly adjacent to the Sunning Hill Park estate.
On June 6th, 1944, the aircraft that swept over the Normandy beaches, provided close air support to Allied ground troops, and dropped American paratroopers behind German lines were commanded and coordinated from plans drawn up at Sunning Hill. From the Georgian salons of Sunning Hill Park, Breitton and his staff planned the organization of an enormous and unprecedented force whose D-Day operations would include not only tactical bombing, but the transportation and delivery of American paratroopers to drop zones behind German lines.
The Georgian house that would burn down 3 years later had by then served as a nerve center for some of the most consequential military operations in history. In 1945, the Crown Estate Commissioners purchased Sunning Hill Park for royal occupation, and the plan was for Princess Elizabeth and her fianceé, Lieutenant Philip Mountbatton, to take up residence after their wedding in November 1947.
On August 30th, 1947, less than 3 months before the royal wedding, the house burned down. The fire broke out while the building was still unoccupied and unfernished. 10 fire engines were called to the scene. Eyewitness accounts described the mansion as well al light when they arrived, and firefighters drew water from the estate’s own lake to fight the blaze.
Photographs taken after the fire showed only gutted walls and a roofless shell, and a contemporary newspaper caption described Sunning Hill Park as badly damaged by fire, noting that only the servants quarters were left undamaged. The cause was never definitively established. Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philillip rented Windsham Moore instead and later took up residence at Clarence House.
In the mid 1960s, there was a proposal to use the now empty land as the site of a new home for Princess Margaret, but this too came to nothing, and the Sunning Hill site lay cleared and fow under crown ownership for the next four decades. When Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson at Westminster Abbey on July 23rd, 1986, he was riding a wave of genuine public popularity that is today almost impossible to reconstruct.
He was a 26-year-old Royal Navy officer who had served as a Sea King helicopter pilot aboard HMS Invincible during the 1982 Falklands War, a naval combat deployment during which he flew anti-ubmarine patrols, acted as a decoy for Argentinian exoset missiles and genuinely placed himself in harm’s way. He returned from the South Atlantic in September 1982 to enormous press adulation, the kind of uncomplicated hero worship that British tabloids are uniquely capable of generating, and that he would spend the next three decades
destroying. His marriage to the red-haired, ebulliant Sarah Ferguson, herself, celebrated for her lack of stuffy royal formality, was greeted as a breath of fresh air in an institution perceived as increasingly distant. Their wedding at Westminster Abbey drew enormous crowds and a global television audience that reflected the genuine warmth with which the British public regarded the couple.
In 1986, Queen Elizabeth determined that the Sunning Hill site would serve as the location for a new bespoke home. And in 1986, the 5 acre walled garden portion of the estate was purchased from the Crown Estate Commissioners specifically for this purpose. The Queen simultaneously took out a 125-year lease on the property from the Crown estate in 1987.
And crucially, as land registry documents would later reveal, this lease was held in the Queen’s name throughout, meaning that Andrew never personally owned the property at any point during his 14-year residence there and paid no rent whatsoever for the use of it. In May 1987, the Queen created a company called Tyros 83 Limited, specifically to acquire, hold, and deal with the property on Andrews behalf, and the Freehold of Sunning Hill remained with the Crown Estate until August 2003, when through the mechanism of Tyros and
subsequent trust arrangements, it was transferred into a trust controlled by the Queen’s personal lawyer, Mark Bridges, and Sir Alan Reed, keeper of the Queen’s privy purse for just £12,500. That same trust, known as the Sunning Hill Park settlement, would sell the property to a Kazak billionaire 4 years later for £15 million with the beneficiaries of the trust remaining secret.
The construction costs were funded by the Queen with early reports suggesting an initial gift of around £250,000, though overruns reportedly required the Queen to intervene to curb the couple’s escalating ambitions for the house. The house was designed by Sir James Dunbar Nasmouth, who served as the Balmoral Estate Architect and held a chair as professor and head of the school of architecture at Harriet Watt University in Edinburgh.
Dunbar Nazmouth was principally known as a conservation architect of sensitivity and distinction. His most admired projects including a trio of Scottish theaters and his professional reputation resting on the restoration and careful adaptation of existing historic fabric rather than the design of new country houses.
The Sunning Hill Commission was therefore something of an anomaly in his portfolio, a brief not for conservation, but for the creation from scratch of a modern royal home on a site with a 400year history. According to the 1987 planning documents, the proposed main building was to be a two-story structure in red brick with stone cladding, described in the application as a modern interpretation of a county house.
A formulation that once built struck critics as more euphemism than description. The project did not pass through the planning system without resistance. Sunning Hill Park sat within a designated green belt conservation area in Barkshire. The initial planning application was rejected by the county authorities and it was approved only after being overruled by Brarol Council in a decision that attracted considerable attention precisely because of the identity of the applicant.
Several local residents were additionally reported to have been displaced from their homes in the vicinity as part of security arrangements connected to the construction. These circumstances, green belt override, planning objections, displaced locals would prove to be a dry run for the institutional and regulatory friction that would surround the house throughout its short life.
The completed estate covered approximately 665 acres directly north of the hamlet of Cheapside in the civil parishes of Sunning Hill, Ascot, and Winkfield, directly adjoining Windsor Great Park. And the mansion itself sat within the 5 acre walled plot surrounded by 8ft walls. Beyond the walls, the wider grounds included two ponds that had been merged into a single ornamental lake, a children’s play area, tennis courts, a fountain, an elaborate security gate house at the front of the estate, and a helipad appropriate for a pilot prince
with an active official diary. The exterior of the house was the source of immediate and almost unanimous critical condemnation. The building presented a long horizontal two-story facade in red brick with rows of uniform windows at regular intervals and a flat roof line that gave the whole structure the appearance as critics noted almost in unison of a large suburban supermarket or a mid-range hotel.
Royal biographer Penny Junor summarized the consensus with characteristic directness. The press quite rightly said it looked like a Tesco. The nicknames arrived almost simultaneously with the photographs. South York became the house’s most enduring so a pun on South Fork, the garish Texan ranch at the heart of the 1980s American soap opera Dallas with York substituted to reflect Andrew’s dukedom.
Dallas Palace fused both associations and Happy Eater Hall invoked the roadside catering chains then dotting British motorways. A uniquely unkind comparison for a house that had cost the crown an estimated several million pounds to construct. Royal author Andrew Morton observed that Sunning Hill was the first example of a royal building in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.
And it was the first newly built royal residence since Bagshot Park, constructed in 1879 for the Duke of Conort, making a 108-year gap in the tradition of royal new builds. Given the cultural and architectural weight that might have attached to such a commission, what rose on the Sunning Hill site over the following three years was, to put it charitably, a disappointment.
The house that was intended to be the first newly built royal residence in over a century became instead the most ridiculed building in the modern history of the British monarchy. And its architect’s name, however, distinguished his other work, would forever be attached to a structure that the British public, compared to a place where you buy groceries.
What the exterior lacked in architectural grace, the interior made up for with a personality that was abundant, assertive, and depending on one’s taste, either charmingly personal or magnificently vulgar. Entry was through a 35- ft high stone flagged entrance hall that rose to a glass dome and a minstrel’s gallery overlooking the space from above, decorated with a medieval solders helmet borrowed on long-term loan from the armory at Windsor Castle and with the stuffed head of a large North American buffalo.
The principal living room featured a large fireplace flanked by Ferguson tartan drapes, peachcoled walls, a grand piano draped in silverframed family photographs, sofas upholstered with the entwined initials A and S embroidered into the fabric, and a collection of approximately half a dozen giant stuffed teddy bears reflective of what would become a noted personal obsession of Prince Andrews, who was later reported to travel with a collection of 72 teddy bears.
and to have sleeping rules for how they were arranged on his bed. The dining room was fitted in red and white, furnished with 24 Chippendale chairs, 16 of them made to match the eight originals, and a chandelier reported to have cost £12,000. Dinner parties here were formal affairs, served by staff in white tie across four or five courses on plates bearing the entwined A and S monogram, and the scale of entertaining that the room was designed to accommodate suggested that the couple had their marriage and royal careers unfolded differently, might have
hosted on a level to rival any royal household in Europe. This monogram was not confined to the dinner service. Guests reported finding the same initials embossed on towels, flannels, hand soaps, and even toilet paper throughout the house. A level of personalization that struck visitors as somewhat beyond the bounds of ordinary taste.
The downstairs cloak room contained a musical toilet roll holder that played either God saved the queen or the star spangled banner, apparently depending on the nationality of the occupant. Prince Andrew’s private study was lined in deep red wall coverings and fitted with dark oak shelving that appeared to be crowded with books, but closer inspection revealed them to be fake.
The spines carved from wood and the books purely decorative, concealing behind them a wall safe. A curved staircase led from the entrance hall to the master bedroom suite, which measured 40 ft x 25 ft with a four- poster bed draped in a mint green floral canopy, bay windows looking out over the rear garden, and a collection of antique teddy bears arranged on the bed itself.
The onsuite bathroom featured what the construction workers who built it had nicknamed HMS Fergie, a giant marble bathtub oversized to a degree that apparently justified a naval socket. The walk-in wardrobe connected to the master suite was designed by Andrew’s cousin, the furniture designer David Lindley, now the second Earl of Snowden, son of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong Jones.
Lynley’s wardrobe was reported to measure 100 ft x 50 ft, making it one of the largest private wardrobes in Britain. Built to serve the Duchess of York’s legendarily extensive wardrobe, the maintenance of which consumed considerable financial resources and was a recurring subject of tabloid interest throughout the marriage. The full complement of rooms beyond the formal reception spaces included 20 rooms of staff accommodation, a swimming pool, a cinema, a gym, a games room, a library, and a pool room.
And one room had been set aside as what those who saw it described as an Aladdin’s cave. Floor toseeiling stacks of cardboard boxes containing a portion of the couple’s approximately 2,000 wedding gifts. These included 600 dinner plates in eight different patterns. 24 antique silver serving dishes individually priced between £1,500 and £8,000.
36 silver and glass condiment sets approximately 1,000 crystal glasses and some 300 ves costing up to £600 each. The nursery wing on the upper floor contained twin bedrooms. One with purple wallpaper and one with blue, a children’s bathroom and a dedicated playroom. A guest bedroom decorated with apecovered wallpaper was referred to within the household as the monkey room.
The house was equipped with 12 separate telephone lines, walls reinforced with blast proof plastic sheeting, panic buttons in the bedrooms, and a fully fitted bomb shelter. security measures whose annual maintenance was estimated to cost in excess of £300,000. The wedding presents, so far as the record shows, were never fully unpacked.
Andrew and Sarah moved into Sunning Hill in 1990, and for a brief early period, the house served its intended purpose. a family home for a working royal couple with two young children, a full domestic staff, and a social calendar that matched the scale of the building. Their daughters, Princess Beatatrice, born in August 1988, and Princess Euenei, born in March 1990, grew up within its walls during their earliest years, exploring its grounds and benefiting from proximity to Windsor Castle and the nearby properties where other members of
the royal family gathered. The couple entertained regularly and on a considerable scale. Weekend dinner parties served on monogrammed China by white tide staff. Informal gatherings connected to Ascot Racing Week and the presence of Andrew’s extensive circle of international acquaintances made Sunning Hill a genuine social hub in the early years of the decade.
But the facade of domestic contentment did not hold. Andrew’s naval career frequently took him away for extended periods. Sarah developed an increasingly independent public profile that the palace found difficult to manage. And by 1992, the same year that Prince Charles and Princess Diana separated and that Windsor Castle suffered its own catastrophic fire.
The marriage of the Duke and Duchess of York, had publicly collapsed. They announced their formal separation and the phrase Anus Horabilis coined by the Queen to describe 1992 applied to Sunning Hill as much as to any other royal address. Both Andrew and Sarah had from almost the beginning of their marriage interests and activities that pulled them in different directions.
Andrew’s naval career was demanding and frequently took him away for extended periods, while Sarah developed an increasingly independent public profile that the palace found difficult to manage, and the combination of distance, incompatibility, and the relentless pressure of tabloid scrutiny eventually proved unsustainable.
that the house that had been built to announce a new chapter in the royal story had become within 2 years of its completion the setting for that chapter’s collapse. Their divorce was finalized in 1996 and in an arrangement that struck outside observers as highly unconventional. Andrew and Sarah continued to cohabit at Sunning Hill for years after both their 1992 separation and their 1996 divorce.
They presented themselves as a modern family that had put the well-being of Beatrice and Ujeni above any personal awkwardness. And the house that had been built for a royal marriage continued to shelter a royal divorce with the same stubborn indifference to conventional expectations that had characterized both the building and its occupants from the beginning.
Journalists who wrote about the arrangement struggled to find adequate vocabulary for it. The couple was not reconciled. They were unambiguously divorced, yet they shared the same vast house, attended family occasions together, and maintained the fiction of a functional domestic unit with considerable conviction. The tabloids were simultaneously fascinated and baffled, though their coverage tended towards entertainment rather than scrutiny of what the arrangement implied about the uses to which a crown owned property was being put.
Sunning Hill became tangentially implicated in one of the most damaging allegations Andrew would ever face and in the most memorably bizarre alibi of modern British public life. On the night of March 10th, 2001, Virginia Duffrey, then Virginia Roberts, alleged that she had been trafficked by the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his associate Gizlain Maxwell to have sex with Prince Andrew at Gizlane Maxwell’s house in London.
The allegation, when it became public years later, would become the most damaging single claim in the history of the modern British monarchy. In his catastrophic November 2019 newsight interview with presenter Emily Maitless, Andrew responded by stating that he had spent the afternoon in question taking his daughter Princess Beatatrice to a birthday party at the Pizza Express restaurant in Woking at I suppose sort of 4:00 p.m. or 5:00 p.m.
in the afternoon and had then returned home for the evening. Home in this context was understood to mean somewhere on or near the Windsor estate with Sunning Hill Park, still his official residence in March 2001, the likeliest specific location. The alibi was widely mocked, not only because of the peculiarity of remembering a Pizza Express visit 18 years later with apparent precision, but because Andrew explained that he remembered it specifically because going to Pizza Express in Woking is an unusual thing for me to do.
Within minutes of the interview’s broadcast, Trip Adviser and Google reviews for the Woking Pizza Express were flooded with satirical comments, and the restaurant briefly became one of the most reviewed establishments in Britain. A royal protection officer subsequently stated that Andrew could have returned from Pizza Express or Sunning Hill Park in the early evening, a formulation notable for its deliberate ambiguity.
The broader consequences of the Epstein connection, the civil settlement in 2022, the stripping of military titles and royal patronages in January 2022 belong to a wider narrative. But the Pizza Express alibi, with its implicit reference to a Sunning Hill adjacent evening, remains one of the stranger footnotes in the house’s biography.
Following the death of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in March 2002, her former home, Royal Lodge, a 30 room Regency House set in 12 acres of Windsor Great Park with a substantial walled garden became available within the royal family. The property’s open market value would eventually be estimated at no less than 30 million.
Andrew announced his intention to make it his primary residence, but refurbishing Royal Lodge to an appropriate standard required an estimated £7.5 million, a sum that Andrew did not have in ready cash. To fund the works, his advisers took out a mortgage on Sunning Hill Park, a transaction of notable legal ingenuity given that Andrew had never personally owned the property on which the mortgage was being secured.
The conveyancing structure that made this possible was notably complex. The freehold of Sunning Hill had remained with the Crown estate throughout Andrews residence and in August 2003 it was transferred for the nominal sum of £12,500 into the Sunning Hill Park settlement a trust administered by the Queen’s personal lawyer Mark Bridges and Sir Alan Reed keeper of the Privy Purse with the beneficiaries kept confidential the chain of ownership from Crown Estate through Tyrros 83.
Three, limited through the settlement trust was structured in such a way that the proceeds of any eventual sale could flow to Andrew’s financial benefit without him having personally owned the asset at any stage. Andrew simultaneously paid approximately 1 million for a 75-year lease on Royal Lodge and began the 7.
5 million refurbishment. Andrew moved to Royal Lodge in 2004, and Sarah Ferguson and the two princesses remained at Sunning Hill until 2006, using it as their base, while Andrews advisers had been trying with increasing desperation to sell the property to any credible buyer. The house had been listed at £12 million since 2001, a figure that, according to a surveyor later commissioned by the eventual buyer, substantially exceeded its actual market value.
For 5 years, the property attracted no serious offer, and the house sat on the market, mocked in the press and untouched by buyers, as a monument to the gap between what a royal provenence was worth in prestige and what a Tesco-shaped mansion was worth in cash. Sunning Hill Park sat on the market for 5 years without attracting a serious offer.
And a surveyor later commissioned by the eventual buyer concluded that the tired and outdated home with its notorious exterior lacked the wow factor and was worth no more than approximately £8 million and as little as £6.4 million at auction. Andrew reportedly attempted to market it personally during a 2003 official visit to Bahrain in his capacity as Britain’s special representative for international trade and investment, approaching Bahraini royalty through his deputy ambassador.
But nothing came of this approach. In September 2007, Sunning Hill Park was sold to Unity Assets Corporation, a company registered in the British Virgin Islands. The sale price was recorded in land registry documents as £15 million,3 million above the already struggling asking price of 12 million and by the surveyor’s estimate at least 7 million above the property’s realistic market value of approximately £8 million.
The gap between what the property was worth on the open market and what was paid for it, a premium of between3 and£7 million, depending on which valuation one accepts, has never been satisfactorily explained by any party to the transaction. No competing bids on the open market had materialized in the preceding 5 years, and the generous offer arrived through a chain of intermediaries with no public explanation for the premium.
The negotiator was Kenes Rakashev, a 29-year-old Kazak businessman who described himself publicly as a friend of Prince Andrew and who had reportedly met with Andrew in both London and Kazakhstan in the year preceding the sale. Rakkes insisted he was not himself the actual buyer and he claimed to have brokered the deal with the assistance of his father-in-law, Imanggali Tasma, then the mayor of Aana.
The true owner of Unity Assets Corporation was concealed behind the BVI Shell Company for 3 years until investigative reporting by the Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph in 2010 identified him as Timor Kulibayv, the billionaire son-in-law of Nosultan Nazabayv, Kazakhstan’s autocratic president who had ruled the country since independence in 1991.
The surveyor Mark Cohen commissioned by Kulib in 2010 confirmed that the tired and outdated home lacked the wow factor and was worth no more than approximately £8 million on the open market and as little as6.4 million at auction, making the£15 million purchase price all the more difficult to explain by ordinary commercial logic.
The deeper facilitator of the introduction was Gaar Gogga Ashkanazi, an Oxford educated Kazakborn socialite who had first met Andrew at a New Year’s Eve party in Phuket, Thailand at the turn of 2001, at which Andrew was reportedly besotted. She had been his guest at Royal Ascot in June 2007, where she was introduced to the Queen days after contracts for the Sunning Hill sale had been exchanged.
Ashkenazi was also, according to reporting published at the time, the mother of a child fathered by Koulib himself, born in 2007, a fact that placed her at the center of both the social and financial web, connecting Andrew to his eventual buyer. The relationship between Andrew and Ashkanazi was described in the press as one of mutual fascination.
He was drawn to her glamour and international connections. She benefited from proximity to a senior member of the British royal family and the commercial transaction that linked them. The 15 million pound sale of a former royal residence to the billionaire whose circle she moved in was facilitated by a chain of personal introductions that would have been impossible without her.
Andrew had cultivated extensive relationships with the Kazakhstani elite across his tenure as special representative for international trade and investment, visiting the country multiple times in an official capacity, publicly championing British commercial interests in Kazakhstan’s enormous energy sector and enjoying personal hospitality from President Nazabayv that included a goose shooting expedition with the president himself.
A source close to Andrew acknowledged his friendship with Kulib specifically. The two were said to have hunted and played golf together. Ashkenazi later told the Evening Standard that the property had not been purchased for personal occupation. The plan, as I understand it, is to convert it into a charitable school for bright Kazak children.
No such school was ever proposed in planning documents. No charitable foundation was registered in connection with the property and no Kazak children were ever educated there. The house would stand empty for 8 years, accumulating weeds and broken windows and the kind of accelerating decay that abandoned buildings suffer when their absent and legally embattled owners live on the other side of the world.
Andrew had cultivated extensive and wellocumented relationships with the Kazakhstani elite across the decade of his tenure as Britain’s special representative for international trade and investment, a role he held from 2001 to 2011. He had visited Kazakhstan multiple times in an official capacity, had publicly championed British commercial interests in the country’s energy sector, and had enjoyed personal hospitality from President Nazabayv that extended well beyond official courtesies, including a goose shooting
expedition with the president himself. The ICIJ’s Caspian Cabal’s investigation published in November 2024 revealed the full scale of the purchases Koulib made in the United Kingdom in 2007, the same year he bought Sunning Hill. The Berkshire estate was one of six UK properties acquired that year by Kulib’s network of companies.
The six properties together totaling approximately $184 million in value, three of them located in Mayfair. The Indian businessman Arvin Tiku was identified as having helped Koulibayv acquire the Sunning Hill property. Specifically, the most serious and most recent revelation came from a BBC investigation published in January 2026.
The BBC found that Kulibayv had used a loan from a company called Envirro Pacific Investments to partially fund the purchase of Sunning Hill Park. and Kulibayv’s lawyers confirmed to the BBC that Envirro Pacific had provided a loan of approximately6 million described as a purely commercial transaction issued at market rates and subsequently repaid with interest.
However, Italian court documents obtained through the ICIJ’s Caspian Cabal’s investigation showed that Envirro Pacific had received funds connected to criminal corruption through a company called Aventl and that these payments had occurred in the weeks immediately before Kulib purchased Sunning Hill. In a separate Italian criminal case concluded in 2017, an oil executive named Agugustino Bianke pleaded guilty to bribing Koulibayv and other Kazak officials in exchange for the award of public contracts worth $7 million in profit to his firm. The
convergence of these separate lines of investigation, the Italian criminal conviction, the BBC’s tracing of the Envirro Pacific loan, and the ICIJ’s mapping of the broader Kulib corporate empire created a body of evidence that placed the Sunning Hill transaction at the intersection of royal property dealing, Central Asian oligarchic wealth, and documented criminal corruption.
Money laundering expert Tom Kitinger, director of the Center for Finance and Security, stated publicly that the deal had exhibited blatant red flags that should have prompted detailed checks to ensure it was not helping to launder the proceeds of corruption. Analysis published in the Daily Telegraph in 2011 concluded that Andrew had used the complex legal arrangement, the Tyrose Company, the Sunning Hill Park Settlement Trust, and the rooting of the Freehold through various royal entities to avoid up to 6 million in capital
gains tax. The core of the arrangement was that Andrew had never personally owned Sunning Hill. The lease was in the Queen’s name. The Freehold had passed through a royal trust, and the sale could be structured to minimize tax exposure while still delivering the sale proceeds to Andrew’s financial benefit. He received the proceeds of the sale of a property he had never purchased, never paid rent on, and never held in his own name through an ownership structure that shielded him from capital gains liability.
Leaked emails published by the Daily Mail in 2016 alleged that Andrew’s private office staff had exchanged correspondence with Kazak counterparts discussing interior design matters for the property security arrangements and even the potential leasing of two adjacent fields at a peppercorn rent, though that particular proposal was not pursued.
Koulibv’s lawyers told the BBC that he had never engaged in bribery or corruption and that the funds used to acquire Sunning Hill Park were entirely legitimate. Having paid generously for a property he apparently never intended to live in, Kulib did nothing with Sunning Hill Park for 8 years.
Within approximately 2 years of the 2007 sale, neighbors and journalists were reporting visible and deteriorating signs of neglect. Doors hanging open, weeds sprouting through the terrace paving, windows broken, grass growing through the cover over the empty swimming pool, peeling paintwork, and a general air of dereliction. By 2009, the gardens had become so overgrown that the property was virtually invisible from the road.
Utility bills were reportedly going unpaid and several break-ins had been reported to local police. The tennis courts were unmaintained. The helipad weed choked and the ornamental lake that had supplied firefighters with water in 1947 had grown wild and unckempt. By 2009, the gardens had become so overgrown that the property was virtually invisible from the road.
Utility bills were reportedly going unpaid and several break-ins had been reported to local police. In July 2009, Bracknel Forest Burough Council was reported to be considering seizing the property under the Housing Act 2004, the legislation designed to address abandoned and dangerously neglected residential buildings and converting it into emergency accommodation for homeless people.
a royal wedding gift housing the homeless while its legally ambiguous owner sat in Kazakhstan. Nothing came of the proposal, but the irony was not lost on anyone. By 2014, published photographs of the mansion showed an advanced state of dilapidation, plaster falling from walls, vegetation reclaiming exterior surfaces, and the overall appearance of a building abandoned in haste rather than simply left vacant.
In 2013, representatives acting on behalf of Kulibv applied for planning permission to demolish the existing structure and replace it with a new, larger house. The application was granted. Demolition contractors moved in. And then they discovered roosting under the roof of the old mansion, a colony of more than 100 bats.
Under the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations, it is a criminal offense in the United Kingdom to disturb, damage, or destroy a bat roost without specific license. and the Pipistrail bats had found in the derelict and undisturbed royal mansion an ideal roosting habitat. Their legal protection momentarily made them the most powerful obstacles to the demolition of a former royal residence in British history.
The bats pipistrail species the most common and widespread bat in Britain had legal protection that momentarily made them the most powerful obstacles to the demolition of a former royal residence in British history. Contractors were obliged to halt operations, employ ecologists to survey the roost, establish the number and species of bats, develop a mitigation plan, and physically relocate the colony to suitable alternative accommodation before demolition could legally proceed.
Once the bats had been successfully relocated, the legal obstacle was removed. Demolition began in 2015 and was complete by 2016, ending approximately 30 years of existence for a house that had been mocked from the day its plans were submitted, had sheltered a marriage that lasted 6 years, had stood empty for eight more, had been saved from demolition by creatures weighing less than an ounce, and had never at any point in its brief and unhappy life quite managed to be what it was built to be.
In place of the 12-bedroom red brick Tesco that had housed a royal marriage, Kulib commissioned a new and considerably larger replacement. The architectural firm engaged was HK, an international firm with a substantial portfolio, including the BBC’s broadcasting house, who signed a non-disclosure agreement and declined to discuss the project.
Planning documents describe the replacement as significantly larger than the original and the completed structure is a 14-bedroom mansion, suggesting the final build exceeded the originally permitted specifications. By 2021, the new structure was described in press reports as near completion, and early accounts cited six onsuite bedrooms, sweeping glass balconies, towering French doors, and a 25 m swimming pool, though subsequent reporting referred to the completed structure as a 14-bedroom mansion, suggesting the final build
exceeded the originally permitted specifications. When journalists from the Sun visited the site in 2022, they found what still appeared to be an active construction site with temporary wooden fencing, steel beams still being erected, bags of rubble on pallets, and a handful of workers visible through gaps in the hoarding.
By November 2025, the property remained unoccupied. Neighbors told the newspaper, “It’s a monstrosity. The building work has been going on for so long.” The architectural firm engaged for the project was HK, an international firm whose portfolio includes the BBC’s broadcasting house in London and who signed a non-disclosure agreement and declined to discuss the commission with journalists.
The gap between the caliber of the architect and the obscurity of the client, the secrecy of the brief and the emptiness of the result constitutes its own form of commentary on what the Sunning Hill site has become. a place where distinguished professional talent is hired, paid, sworn to silence, and deployed in the service of a building that nobody lives in.
While his Berkshire construction project dragged on, the man who owned it was facing a deepening legal and political crisis in Kazakhstan. The postnazabayv government of President Kasim Jamat Tokayv seeking to distance itself from the endemic corruption of its predecessor began pursuing the oligarchic networks that had accumulated vast wealth under the old regime.
In late 2024, asset recovery lawsuits were filed against Koulibv by the prosecutor general’s asset recovery committee as part of a broader investigation into wealth accumulated during Nazabayv’s rule. Bloomberg reported in February 2025 that Koulibay was in talks to pay approximately $1 billion to the Kazak state, a combination of cash payments and strategic investments in order to resolve the legal claims against him and avoid further proceedings.
The ICIG documented that Kulib’s empire encompassed more than 220 companies and trusts across 22 countries, including 10 secrecy jurisdictions, and that his real estate portfolio included a UK mansion once owned by Prince Andrew. The Swiss authorities were separately investigating Kulib’s wife, Dinara Kulibva, over property acquisitions in Geneva totaling 126 million Swiss Franks.
As of early 2026, the Sunning Hill Park replacement remains part of a global asset portfolio under varying degrees of legal scrutiny across multiple jurisdictions. The new mansion, like the old one built on a former royal estate, paid for by money linked to questions of transparency and legality, and serving no evident purpose for its absent owner, has become a phantom landmark.
Present without being inhabited, completed without being used, and connected to a royal scandal without implicating anyone currently willing to explain themselves. The Sunning Hill story fits within a pattern that is by any measure extraordinary. Across his adult life, Andrew appears to have paid for none of his major residences in any conventional sense.
At Sunning Hill, the Queen held the lease, funded construction, and structured the ownership to allow Andrew to receive the proceeds of a sale on a property he had never owned. At Royal Lodge, he paid approximately £1 million for a 75-year lease and undertook £7.5 million in refurbishments, but paid thereafter a peppercorn rent of one penny per year if demanded, contributing nothing further to the crown estate for a 30 room Regency mansion, whose open market value was estimated at no less than 30 million.
He also held the lease on East Lodge, a 19th century cottage near the original Sunning Hill site at approximately £13,000 per year, a lease he finally relinquished in early 2026, only when financial pressure and deepening public controversy over his affairs had narrowed his options to Vanishing Point. Andrew also held the lease on East Lodge, a 19th century cottage near the original Sunning Hill site on the Crown estate at approximately 13,000 per year, a lease he finally relinquished in early 2026, only when financial pressure, the
loss of royal income, and the deepening public controversy had narrowed his options to vanishing point. Royal Lodge itself became the subject of protracted negotiations in 2025 when Buckingham Palace announced that Andrew and his family would move out following pressure connected to the Epstein controversy.
A Crown Estate report found the property so dilapidated from lack of adequate maintenance that Andrew will not in all likelihood be owed any compensation for the early surrender of his 75-year lease. a lease that would otherwise have run until 2078. The cost of security arrangements, an enormous ongoing expenditure for a person of Andrew’s public profile and circumstances, was funded for years by the taxpayer and subsequently by King Charles, who reportedly contributed approximately £3 million per year to his brother’s security costs before
withdrawing that support as Andrews public standing continued to deteriorate. The pattern across four decades is consistent. A prince who has never in any conventional sense paid for the roof over his head, whose properties have been funded, built, maintained, and eventually sold through structures designed to insulate him from both cost and accountability, and whose relationship to the houses he has occupied has been that of a beneficiary rather than an owner in any sense that the word is normally understood.
Andrew Morton’s observation that Sunning Hill was the first example of a royal building in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II and that it became a symbol of corruption carries more weight with every passing year. The documentary series Fergie, Andrew, and the Scandal of South York described it as the epicenter of the scandals that follow this controversial couple everywhere they go.
Built in defiance of planning rules in a protected green belt zone. Its design mocked before it was finished. Decorated inside with embossed toilet paper and fake bookshelves hiding a safe gifted to a prince who never paid rent and never personally owned it. Sold over market value to an oligarch whose purchase funds were linked by Italian prosecutors to a bribery scheme.
abandoned for eight years while it rotted, saved briefly from demolition by a colony of bats before being raised and replaced by an even larger mansion that as of 2026 has never been slept in. The Ark of Sunning Hill Park is one of the stranger stories in the modern history of British property, royal or otherwise.
The Georgian house that burned down in 1947 before Princess Elizabeth could move in had planned the D-Day landings from its drawing rooms. The house that replaced it 40 years later planned nothing more consequential than a dinner party on monogrammed China. And the house that replaced that one, commissioned by an oligarch under investigation on three continents and built by an architectural firm bound by a non-disclosure agreement has stood for 19 years without a single night’s occupation. Whether one reads Sununning
Hill as architectural failure, financial scandal, marital ruin, or geopolitical cautionary tale, the conclusion is the same. It was a residence that earned over the course of its 30-year existence, almost every unflattering adjective in the English language, and then after it was gone, managed to generate still more.
The documentary series Fergie, Andrew, and the Scandal of South York described it as the epicenter of the scandals that follow this controversial couple everywhere they go. The epicenter is now rubble, but the scandals, like the phantom mansion that replaced it, show no sign of being occupied by anything so useful as a conclusion.
