#178
Opening Hours
Sunday: 11:30 – 15:30
Saturday: 11:30 – 15:30
What's not to miss inside?
Cottage Orné Architecture
Embodies late-1700s taste for idealised rural buildings in royal landscapes.Timbering, thatch and lattice windows perform ‘rusticity’ for a court that otherwise lived in palaces.
📍 Exterior and ground-floor rooms
The Print Room
Preserves an 18th-century fashion for decorating walls with cut engravings instead of wallpaper.Pinned and pasted prints act like a scrapbook at room scale—news, travel and taste collaged for conversation.
📍 Ground floor, south side
Royal Paddock Story
Traces Kew’s role as a living ‘cabinet of curiosities’.Records note kangaroos and other exotics kept near the cottage in the early 1800s—natural history as courtly spectacle.
📍 Meadow and woodland around the cottage
🤓 Fun Facts
The retreat dates to the 1770s–1780s and is associated with Queen Charlotte’s personal use of Kew as a family landscape, distinct from the formality of nearby Kew Palace.
Its ‘Print Room’ embodies a short-lived decorating craze (c. 1760–1800) where owners curated walls from engravings, often arranged in medallions and cartouches.
Contemporary accounts record a small menagerie at Kew—kangaroos were noted by visitors in the early 19th century—linking the cottage to royal natural-history interests.
