Kate Middleton and Prince William’s new home, Forest Lodge, offers a fresh start after a challenging chapter.

“Adelaide Cottage was a place of pain, suffering and sadness. After such rough times it’s perfectly understandable they would want a new place,” Sally Bedell Smith, royal biographer behind the Royals Extra Substack, tells PEOPLE in this week’s exclusive cover story.

In the autumn, the Prince and Princess of Wales moved their family to Forest Lodge, a secluded property in Windsor Great Park. PEOPLE understands the eight-bedroom residence is their forever home and where the family intends to remain even when William becomes King one day.

It also represents a longterm reset — a chance to build new memories with their children, Prince George, 12, Princess Charlotte, 10, and Prince Louis, 7, after a difficult stretch.

Forest Lodge in Windsor Great Park, Berkshire in 2018.English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty

Adelaide Cottage, their previous home nearby, quickly became tied to some of the hardest chapters of their lives after they moved there in 2022. The house was the backdrop to Queen Elizabeth’s death just days after the children started school that September to the turbulence that followed Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s bombshell docuseries and Harry’s subsequent memoir, Spare, published in 2023.

The upheavals of 2024 followed close behind. In February, King Charles announced his cancer diagnosis while Princess Kate was privately managing her own. By the time she shared her news in March — after first preparing her children — she had already faced weeks of speculation and online conspiracy theories about her absence and well-being.

“She didn’t just face a life-­ threatening illness — the global Internet went after her,” royal historian Amanda Foreman tells PEOPLE. “It was a character assassination.”

PEOPLE Magazine, Dec. 29, 2025.

Now, Princess Kate is relishing the chance to shape their new home from the inside out.

During the German state visit on Dec. 3 she spoke enthusiastically about creating “mood boards” and starting the redecoration process after Christmas, while William acknowledged renovations have been “challenging, with elements of twists.”

Still, he added, they’re “tackling it” together.

Kate Middleton and Prince William travel by horse-drawn carriage for a ceremonial welcome for German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier at Windsor Castle on Dec. 3, 2025.Carlos Jasso – Pool/Getty

At Forest Lodge, the Princess of Wales is applying her artistic eye to create a warm, elegant family home. With room to host family, including a 24-seat dining table she was spotted selecting, the house also reflects their shared goals.

“They are signaling a different kind of lifestyle — it’s very centered on their children,” says Foreman.

Prince William, Prince George, Prince Louis, Princess Charlotte and Kate Middleton at the Together at Christmas Carol Service at Westminster Abbey in London on Dec. 5, 2025.Chris Jackson/Getty

This year was a defining one for the Prince and Princess of Wales, beginning with Princess Kate’s Jan. 14 announcement of her remission from an undisclosed form of cancer and continued with a measured return to public life.

Through it all, Kate and William balanced expanding royal duties with school runs and family life, even as illness still shadows the monarchy. King Charles continues treatment for cancer, though he shared in a rare health update on Dec. 12 that his regimen will be “reduced” in the New Year.

The hopeful development underscores the magnitude of the role that the couple will one day inherit, and the Princess of Wales’ reemergence this year follows not only the intrusive scrutiny of her own diagnosis but the grueling treatment itself — and the fortitude it took to come through it.

“This is someone who stared down the abyss,” Foreman says.