Why Balmoral, the Late Queen’s Favorite Home, Draws Mixed Reviews For Its Wild Plaid Decor

This July, the royal family welcomed guests inside Balmoral Castle for the first time since its completion more than 150 years ago. For generations, Balmoral has been the place where the Windsors gather for a family reunion every summer. Queen Elizabeth II, who died in the castle in 2022, considered it her favorite getaway. It’s also famous for being the site of what The Crown dubbed “The Balmoral Test,” the hazing ritual for politicians and newcomers to the family. All in all, more than 1,300 people were given the opportunity to visit the Scottish seaside castle over the course of two weeks.

Maybe the exclusive opportunity was enough to make up for the common complaint that the house, bedecked in ancient plaids, has some weird quirks. (Even the current visitor enterprise manager called it “very homely.”) The decor in the house has changed only slightly since Queen Victoria and Prince Albert built the castle in the 1850s, and its extremely Scottish energy seems discordant to modern tastes. But apparently the distaste for Balmoral’s interiors goes all the way back to the beginning. In his new book, The Power and the Glory: Life in the English Country House Before the Great War, author Adrian Tinniswood points out that early guests, including politician Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, detested the castle’s interiors.

“Queen Victoria rarely stayed with one of her subjects after Albert’s death in 1861. But she regularly spent time at her own country houses: Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, and Balmoral,” Tinniswood writes. “Both were furnished and decorated to her own taste and the taste of her husband, whose creations they were. It was not shared by everyone: Lord Rosebery famously said he thought the drawing room at Osborne was the ugliest room in the world until he saw the drawing room at Balmoral.”

When Victoria and Albert decorated the castle after construction concluded in 1856, they were determined to put their own stamp on it, designing new plaid patterns to use on carpets, furniture, curtains, and linens around the house, usually opting for multiple patterns in a single room. “Critics of ‘Balmorality’ could daily claim that Highland dress and decoration were overworked by the new owners,” wrote journalist Ivor Brown, in his 1955 book Balmoral: The History of a Home. “The new Balmoral was be-tartaned from the linoleum to the roofs of the rooms.” Even Victoria’s friends were less than impressed. Lady Augusta Stanley, one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, later wrote that the tartan were “highly characteristic and appropriate but not all equally flatteuse to the eye.”

Nevertheless, Brown notes that the introduction of mechanized spinning and weaving to the looms of Scotland made the mad dash for plaid a popular trend. “Queen Victoria was not the first to be infected with the fever of Tartanitis,” he quips. She would also not be the last. Throughout her reign, Queen Elizabeth II followed in the family tradition and wore the specially designed Balmoral Tartan (black, red, and lavender on a grey backdrop) when she spent her summers in the house.

But even Elizabeth had her limits when it came to tartan mania. On September 6, 2022, she welcomed then prime minister Liz Truss to the castle’s drawing room for a meeting that would be her final official engagement. The resulting photograph shows how much the famous drawing room had been toned down since the Victorian era. Instead of the plaid upholstery and flooring that Lord Rosebery disliked, the drawing room was decorated in a (comparatively) sedate sea green color. After the beginning of his reign, however, King Charles III redecorated, restoring the green-and-red Hunting Stewart tartan carpet to its former glory.