Queen Victoria

Residence 1

📍Osborne House, York Avenue, East Cowes, Isle of Wight PO32 6JX, United Kingdom

“Albert designed Osborne and I watched it rise from the clifftop above the Solent between 1845 and 1851 — an Italianate villa that was entirely ours, not a state palace inherited from history, not a gift from a grateful nation, but a home we had chosen and built ourselves. Our nine children grew up running on lawns that Albert designed and swimming in a bathing machine that rolled into the sea on wheels. The island air suited everyone's health and the informality suited mine. On the day Albert died — the fourteenth of December 1861, at Windsor — I came to Osborne to grieve because it was the only house where grief would not be observed and reported. I returned every summer for forty years. I died here on the twenty-second of January 1901, in the same bedroom where so many of my grandchildren had been born. It was the right place to end.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Osborne House

Residence 2

📍Balmoral Estates, Ballater, Aberdeenshire AB35 5TB, Scotland, United Kingdom

“Albert found Balmoral and I found freedom there. In London I was the Queen, surrounded by ceremony and ministers and the endless machinery of empire. In the Highlands I was simply a woman who loved her husband, who walked the hills and sketched the deer and picnicked by the Dee without ceremony. When Albert died in 1861, I came here to grieve in private. I wore black for forty years. But Balmoral was the one place where the grief was honest rather than performed.”

Sources: Wikipedia: Queen Victoria