Queen Charlotte's Cottage
An 18th-century ‘cottage orné’ retreat for Queen Charlotte and George III within Kew Gardens, prized today as a rare survival of the Picturesque fashion. Inside, period rooms show how a royal family used a rustic pavilion—for strolls, picnics and private leisure—while the surrounding glade recalls the former paddock of exotic animals kept at Kew.
Opening Hours
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
Inspire your Friends
- 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.
