Osborne House

Victoria and Albert bought Osborne from Lady Isabella Blachford in October 1845, wanting a home removed from the stresses of court life. Victoria had holidayed on the Isle of Wight as a girl, when her mother, the Duchess of Kent, rented the neighbouring Norris Castle estate; the views of the Solent reminded Albert of the Bay of Naples. The Georgian house they had bought soon proved too small, and it was demolished to make way for a far larger one, though its entrance portico survives as the main gateway to the walled garden.

The new house was built between 1845 and 1851 in the style of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, with two belvedere towers. Albert designed it in conjunction with Thomas Cubitt, the London architect and builder known as "the Emperor of the building trade", whose company also built the pre-1913 main façade of Buckingham Palace. Much of the furnishing was paid for out of the sale of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Victoria called him "our Cubitt".

Albert laid out the estate, gardens and woodlands himself, to prove his knowledge of forestry and landscaping; at the more official royal residences the Commissioners of Woods and Forests, who held responsibility for the grounds, had overruled him. In 1859 Albert designed a larger quadrangular stable block, built by Cubitt's firm on the former cricket pitch and listed Grade II* on the National Heritage List for England.

Writing to her daughter Princess Victoria in 1858 about the gloominess of Windsor, the queen said she longed "for our cheerful and unpalacelike rooms at Osborne". In the grounds stood a Swiss Cottage, brought piece by piece from Switzerland, where each of the royal children was given a plot to grow fruit and vegetables and sold the produce to their father, who used the arrangement to teach the basics of economics.

On 14 January 1878 Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated an early version of the telephone to the queen at Osborne, placing calls to Cowes, Southampton and London — the first publicly witnessed long-distance telephone calls in Britain. She found the process "quite extraordinary" though the sound "rather faint". The final addition to the house was a wing of 1890-91 designed by John Lockwood Kipling, father of Rudyard Kipling. Its ground floor holds the Durbar Room, built for state functions and decorated by Bhai Ram Singh; the floor above was for the sole use of Princess Beatrice, the queen's youngest daughter.

Victoria died at Osborne on 22 January 1901, aged 81, two generations of her family present. Her will left strict instructions that Osborne was to remain in the family, but her children did not share her attachment to it; Princess Beatrice and Princess Louise were granted houses on the estate. Edward VII, who had never liked Osborne, presented it to the nation on his Coronation Day in August 1902, a transfer that required the Osborne Estate Act 1902 because the estate had been entailed to his heirs. The royal apartments on the upper floors of the pavilion wing, the late queen's bedroom among them, were turned into a private museum accessible only to the royal family.

In 1903 the stable block became a Royal Navy junior officer training college, the Royal Naval College, Osborne. Its students included Victoria's great-grandsons the future Edward VIII and George VI; Jack Llewelyn Davies, one of the boys who inspired Peter Pan; and George Archer-Shee, expelled in 1908 after being falsely accused of stealing a five-shilling postal order, a case that inspired the play The Winslow Boy. The college closed in 1921, the last students leaving on 9 April.

Another part of the house served as a convalescent home for officers, with Georgina Haines selected by Edward VII as matron in 1903 and running it until 1917. During the First World War the secondary wings took convalescent officers, Robert Graves and A. A. Milne among the patients. As the King Edward VII Retirement Home for Officers it went on taking convalescents from military and civil service backgrounds until 2000.

Elizabeth II gave permission in 1954 for the private apartments on the pavilion's first floor to be opened to the public, and the second floor followed in 1989. English Heritage took over the management of Osborne in 1986 and opens it to visitors; the house is listed Grade I on the National Heritage List for England and the park and gardens Grade II* on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. Victoria's private beach was opened to the public for the first time in July 2012.