LONDON (AFP) – The childhood home of Prince William’s wife Catherine was sold at auction on Friday to a local couple of teachers for £485,000 ($795,000, 545,000 euros).
West View, the four-bedroomed, detached house where the future royal bride grew up, is in the village of Bradfield Southend. It is near Bucklebury, where the Middleton family now lives, in Berkshire, west of London.
Michael and Carole Middleton bought the red-brick Victorian home in 1979 when he was a pilot and she worked as a British Airways flight attendant. They raised their three children there before selling it in 1995.
The house retains many Victorian features and still has the outbuilding used as an office for Party Pieces, the Middleton family business.
Teachers Emma Appleby, 35, and her partner Tom Wyatt bought the house for £10,000 below the guide price.
“We’ve been looking for a property for a while but there’s not a lot on the market,” Appleby told the Reading Chronicle local newspaper. “The Middleton factor came second, I didn’t really think about it,” she said. “It should be lovely, I’m really looking forward to it.”
William and the former Kate Middleton, now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, married on April 29 at London’s Westminster Abbey, with hundreds of thousands on the streets to cheer them on and around two billion people watching on television across the globe.
The couple now lives on the island of Anglesey, northwest Wales, where Prince William works as a search and rescue helicopter pilot.
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