Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip had several palatial residences at their disposal: Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Balmoral, Sandringham, just to name a few. One of their favorite places to spend their days was a comparatively modest farmhouse on the Sandringham estate, called Wood Farm.
"They adored the simplicity of what Wood Farm represented," a royal courtier revealed to the Daily Mail. "For the Duke, it was the light which he thought was perfect to paint by, and the proximity to the sea only a couple of miles away,” the courtier shared, while the late “Queen likes the unfussiness—the sense of getting away from it all and being able to slip out for a walk with the dogs whenever she likes."
Wood Farm provided the Queen and Prince Philip a sense of normalcy, which allowed them to pretend they weren’t carrying the enormous weight of the monarchy and could just be a married couple. "Often [Prince Philip] and the Queen when Sandringham was open to the general public or whatever, he and the Queen would live at Wood Farm, doing their own washing up, maybe even stacking the dishwasher," Emily Andrews revealed on a recent episode of her podcast Catching Up With The Royals.
Dickie Arbiter, the late Queen’s former press secretary, confirmed the former monarch’s penchant for washing dishes. While visiting Balmoral, Arbiter wrote “I heard footsteps and, thinking it was the Lady-in-Waiting coming to give me a hand, I casually said over my shoulder, ‘Okay, I’ll wash you dry,’ but it was not the Lady-in-Waiting. The Queen washed up and I dried, and no, she did not wear rubber gloves to protect her hands.”
Following his retirement from royal life in 2017, Prince Philip moved to Wood Farm full-time, where he could spend his days doing whatever he pleased—perhaps washing dishes in peace. "He wanted nothing more to do, really, with royal life after that. He went to live and retire at Wood Farm and he actually didn’t see the Queen very much," Andrews reported. "[It] was where he painted, it was his home. And it always has held a special place for him and the Queen."
