The Gist
Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, and their children Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet live in California now—but it turns out Princess Diana had California dreams of her own after her divorce from Prince Charles.
The former Princess of Wales expressed interest in moving to Malibu, according to her former royal butler Paul Burrell.
The move to the United States represented a fresh start and a “new life” for Diana, he said.
Long before Prince Harry and Meghan Markle made Montecito their home in 2020, Harry’s mother Princess Diana had California dreams of her own.
For the former Princess of Wales, it was Malibu she had her eye on—specifically, as Vanity Fair put it, building a “new life” with boyfriend Dodi Al Fayed there. Both Diana and Al Fayed were killed on August 31, 1997 in the same Paris car crash before those dreams could be realized.
Princess Diana on July 1, 1997, which would become her final birthday.
Credit: Getty
By the time Diana and Al Fayed began dating in the summer of 1997, the royal was divorced from Prince Charles after the proceedings were finalized on August 28, 1996, one year and three days before her death. Diana was figuring out what life looked like after being married into the royal family and was at the peak of her fame—which was always a heightened level of celebrity. The princess was using her influence to make a difference philanthropically, and had hinted to her sister Lady Sarah McCorquodale and one of her best friends, Lúcia Flecha de Lima, that the U.K. might not always be the only home base she had.
What was keeping her in the U.K., of course, were her sons Prince William and Harry, but for many months of the year, the two boys were away at boarding school, leaving Diana a level of freedom. Al Fayed had just purchased property in Malibu on the Pacific Coast Highway—according to Vanity Fair, a mansion on five acres of beachfront in Malibu’s Paradise Cove. The six-bedroom house boasted a guest cottage, pool, tennis court, and direct beach access.
Dodi Al Fayed’s house in Malibu, California.
Credit: Getty
Diana’s former royal butler Paul Burrell—who worked for the princess up until her death—told ABC in 2003 that Diana was planning to move in with her boyfriend in the United States. “She said, ‘This is our new life. Won’t it be great? Think of the lifestyle,'” he said. “‘Nobody’s judgmental here in America. You don’t have the class system. You don’t have the establishment.'”
Writing in his 2006 book The Way We Were, Burrell said, “She knelt on the sitting-room floor and spread out a color brochure and floor plan of a cliff top property in Malibu, California overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The magnificent six-bedroom property had already been laid on a plate for the princess: it was hers if she wanted it. As she invited me to kneel beside her to look at the plans, I had the distinct impression that this was a sneak preview of a ‘done deal.'”
The exterior of Dodi Al Fayed’s Malibu, California home.
Credit: Getty
Harry—who now lives in Montecito, California with his family, just over an hour away from Malibu—was aware of his mother’s plans to relocate. Speaking on the 2022 Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan, he explained that California was “one of the places where I think my mum was probably going to end up living, potentially.”
The possibility of Diana moving to California was introduced in season six of Netflix’s The Crown. In addition to Burrell and Harry, Diana’s former bodyguard Lee Sansum told Inside Edition in 2022 that the princess “was going to the States. And she told me she liked the people in the States. She liked the way she was treated there, she liked the way the press treated her.”
Dodi Al Fayed on August 19, 1997, just days before his death.
Credit: Getty
An eating area in the Malibu home.
Credit: Getty
Speaking to ABC, Burrell said that he thought the royal family would be supportive of her move. “That would be very stiff and staunch if the queen would say, ‘No, they can’t go to America,'” he said.
Diana’s former voice coach Stewart Piece backed up Burrell’s claim. “She was talking about buying a property in Malibu, [saying] that would be ‘really great’ for the boys to have freedom so that they could surf,” he said (per Marie Claire). “Because they’re both very sporty, you know, but they could surf, they could rollerblade, they could Frisbee.”
Princess Diana, Prince Harry, and Prince William in September 1995.
Credit: Getty
The bathroom of the Malibu home.
Credit: Getty
According to Elle Decor, after Diana and Al Fayed’s deaths, the house was put on the market for $10 million. Many years after his initial 2003 claims about Diana’s Malibu dreams, Burrell clarified that the California home would be more of a “bolthole” than a permanent relocation.
The kitchen of the Malibu home.
Credit: Getty
The bedroom of the Malibu home.
Credit: Getty
“She always supported the monarchy—she was proud to be a royal princess, too,” he told Marie Claire in 2023. “Even when she died she was still a princess—Diana, Princess of Wales—and she wanted to continue to support the Crown in anything she did.”
“Just because she wanted to have a bolthole in Malibu in California to take you and your brother on vacation once or twice a year isn’t to say she was about to abandon the country,” he added.
The potential Malibu move remains one of the many unanswered questions about Diana’s life post-divorce—a life she got to have for just 368 days before it ended so quickly and so tragically.
Read the original article on InStyle