One of our biggest stories last week was about Tom Sykes, The Daily Beast’s Royalist, ranting about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s Montecito kitchen. His comments came via his podcast, and he claimed that Prince Harry and Meghan’s rustic Italian kitchen was a “laughingstock” in Montecito because it looked like an “Olive Garden.” Sykes also claimed that all of Montecito thinks the Sussexes are broke-ass because they never ripped out or remodeled the kitchen specifically. Yesterday, Meghan posted some videos and a photo from her kitchen – I even pointed out (jokingly) that this was the alleged “laughingstock kitchen.” Well, guess who rage-typed a five-page diatribe about Meghan’s kitchen? Here’s some of Tom Sykes’ latest Royalist Substack, “Eight Years On, Meghan’s Taco Bell Kitchen Is the Symbol of Project Sussex’s Failure.” Why is Taco Bell in it??
Yesterday was Harry and Meghan’s eighth wedding anniversary, and to mark the occasion Meghan did what Meghan does: she posted to Instagram.
Loads of previously unseen photographs from the wedding day, beautiful images by photographer Chris Allerton, set to Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl. The grand dress sweeping across the floor of St George’s Chapel, Harry gazing at her veil, the serious black-and-whites, the joyful colors. Lovely, even if she couldn’t show us a picture of a royal family member for the obvious reason that she said on TV that they are racists who didn’t care that she wanted to kill herself.
But she also posted something else. New stills and video from inside the house — Harry blowing out a lemon and elderflower cake (a nod to their wedding cake, but one which raises the immediate question: who made it? Meghan has told us, on her own show, that she doesn’t bake. Is this a freebie? A brand deal? If you’re Meghan Markle, lifestyle influencer, surely the whole point is that you made the cake yourself?), an ornamental statue of two penguins nestling together (a gift from Harry which might have been better kept private, but instead we got the whole backstory, some guff about them dressing up as penguins at a party), and the children audible off-camera.
A lot of the new content (yes, that is what it is) was shot in the kitchen. Oh, that kitchen. Orange-brown wood cabinets. Copper pots hanging from the ceiling. An interior that looks like it was last touched in 2003 and specifically like it was designed by someone who thought the Olive Garden was aspirational.
In Montecito — where billionaires routinely knock houses down the moment they buy them and start again from the footprint, where the baseline expectation is that if any aspect of the house doesn’t perfectly suit you, you remodel it— that kitchen is a potent symbol of where things now stand for this couple.
A source who lives in the area told me recently that the Sussex house is a laughing stock in Montecito social circles. In a town where conspicuous renovation is a hobby for rich wives, the fact that they haven’t remodeled EVEN THE KITCHEN of a house that I suspect was last decorated when bought in 2009 by former owner, the Russian fraudster Sergey Grichin (who died in suspicious circumstances in 2023) is a significant tell.
The virtual tour of their embarrassing kitchen is a visual explainer to what a catastrophic mess Project Sussex has become. At the end of last year, they fired the bulk of their staff, shuttered their charity, and pared down their production company to a staff of two (Hollywood people tell me it is now what is dismissively referred to in the town as a “label”, it means the company primarily exists to attach its branding to other projects). Time for a rebrand!
In an ill-advised attempt to make money, the Sussexes went to Australia where Meghan literally sold selfies of herself for money. It was a disaster. The polling was brutal. The line from Team Sussex was that you had to be there, it was different in the room. Website traffic in Australia says otherwise; traffic actually went DOWN while they were there according to Jack Royston’s analysis of Similarweb data.
Time for a rebrand! So off Meghan goes to Geneva to play Serious Meghan at the World Health Organization, with a speech about children and social media, and a photo-op with Dr Tedros. Except Geneva was ignored. And being ignored is a worse fate than being criticized. Criticism means you still matter. Matt Wilkinson from the Sun, Rebecca English from the Mail, Victoria Ward from the Telegraph, Kate Mansey from the Times, the people who actually set the global royal narrative, didn’t go.
…What Meghan would obviously love to be showcasing right now (wouldn’t we all) is a spectacular new renovation; clean lines, bespoke cabinetry, the kind of kitchen that makes people stop scrolling. The kind of kitchen, indeed, that she chose for With Love, Meghan, which at least looked like someone had made a decision about how it should look. Instead we’re getting the original fittings, the copper pots, the whole dreary inheritance of whoever owned the house before them. The wider point is that the whole Meghan and Harry brand is in a state of total chaos, a scattergun, no-one-is-steering-this chaos.
As I said last week, I cannot even imagine being full of such bitch-eating-crackers bile for a KITCHEN. Like, Laura Dern is my nemesis but I would never rant about her OR her kitchen for weeks on end. Think of how desperate these people are to grasp onto any lie, any bitchy comment, all to “prove” that Meghan is “failing.” And throughout it all, it’s beyond clear that it would never occur to Sykes that Meghan hasn’t renovated her kitchen because she likes it? She’s not hiding it – she regularly posts photos from her kitchen and she regularly uses her kitchen for her As Ever photoshoots too. She genuinely likes all of that warm wood and the blue-and-white tile work and her expensive, good-condition stove. This too is a marker of class – many real elites would think it’s very gauche, wasteful and nouveau-riche to rip out a perfectly good kitchen which fits the aesthetic of a home. That is the kind of thing Kate Middleton has done multiple times.
Photos courtesy of Meghan’s Instagram and As Ever’s Instagram.
