Following his death in 1910, the estate passed to Edward's son and heir, George V, who described the house as "dear old Sandringham, the place I love better than anywhere else in the world".

[3] The local antiquarian Claude Messent, in his study The Architecture on the Royal Estate of Sandringham, records the discovery of evidence of the pavements of a Roman villa near Appleton farm.

In the Elizabethan era a manor was built on the site of the present house, which, by the 18th century, came into the possession of the Hoste Henley family, descendants of Dutch refugees.

[7] Motteux was also without heirs and bequeathed Sandringham, together with another Norfolk estate and a property in Surrey, to the third son of his close friend, Emily Lamb, the wife of Lord Palmerston.

[9] The death in 1854, from cholera, of their only child Mary Harriette, led the couple to spend even more time abroad – mainly in Paris – and by the early 1860s Cowper was keen to sell the estate.

[13] Albert had his staff investigate 18 possible country estates that might be suitable, including Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire and Houghton Hall in Norfolk.

[18][b] Over the course of the next forty years, and with considerable expenditure, Edward was to create a house and country estate that his friend Charles Carington[1] called "the most comfortable in England".

[23][24][c] This is questioned by Helen Walch, author of the estate's recent (2012) history, who shows the detailed analysis undertaken by the Prince Consort's advisers and suggests that the cost was reasonable.

As he had with the Bachelors' Wing, Edis tried to harmonise these additions with Humbert's house by following the original Jacobethan style, and by using matching brickwork and Ketton stone.

[46] To increase the amount of daylight available during the shooting season, which ran from October to February,[47] the prince introduced the tradition of Sandringham Time, whereby all the clocks on the estate were set half an hour ahead of GMT.

[62] The King also lacked the sociability of his father, and the shortage of space at York Cottage enabled him to limit the entertaining he undertook, with the small rooms reportedly reminding him of the onboard cabins of his naval career.

Even greater upheaval was occasioned by the outbreak of the First World War, a dynastic struggle that involved many of his relatives, including the German Kaiser and the Russian Emperor, both of whom had previously been guests at Sandringham.

Sandringham he described as a "voracious white elephant",[83] and he asked his brother, the Duke of York to undertake a review of the management of the estate,[84] which had been costing his father £50,000 annually in subsidies at the time of his death.

[86] The party was interrupted by a request to meet with prime minister Stanley Baldwin, and having arrived on a Sunday, the King returned to Fort Belvedere the next day.

[100] His body was placed in the Church of St Mary Magdalene, before being taken to Wolferton Station and transported by train to London, to lie in state at Westminster Hall.

[102] Following King George VI's death, Queen Elizabeth II's custom was to spend the anniversary of that and of her own accession privately with her family at Sandringham House, and, toward the end of her reign, to use it as her official base from Christmas until February.

[107] The Duke worked to move towards self-sufficiency,[108] generating additional income streams, taking more of the land in hand, and amalgamating many of the smaller tenant farms.

Eden's wife, Clarissa, recorded the event in her diary, "8 January – Anthony has to go through a Cabinet and listening to Harold prosing for half an hour.

[35] The plans were not taken forward, but modernisation of the interior of the house and the removal of a range of ancillary buildings were carried out by Hugh Casson, who also decorated the Royal Yacht, Britannia.

[127] The walls of the corridors connecting the principal rooms display a collection of Oriental and Indian arms and armour,[128] gathered by Edward VII on his tour of the East in 1875–1876.

[2] On one of her two visits to the house, Victoria recorded in her journal that, after dinner, the party adjourned to "the very long and handsome drawing room with painted ceiling and two fireplaces".

Its chief fault is the lack of harmony between Humbert's original building and Edis's extensions, "a contrast between the northern and southern halves of the house (that) has been much criticised ever since".

[19] The writer Clive Aslet suggests that the sporting opportunities offered by the estate were the main attraction for its royal owners, rather than "the house itself, which even after rebuilding was never beguiling".

[q][61] The fittings and furnishings were also criticised; the biographer of George V, Kenneth Rose, wrote that, "except for some tapestries given by Alfonso XII,[r] Sandringham had not a single good picture, piece of furniture or other work of art".

[139] In the series of articles on the house and estate published in 1902 by Country Life to celebrate Edward VII's accession, the author noted the royal family's "set policy of preferring those pictures that have associations to those which have merely artistic merit".

[141] The house also has an extensive holding of works by Fabergé, the world's largest, assembled by Queen Alexandra and later members of the family,[142] which includes representations of farm animals from the Sandringham estate commissioned by Edward VII as presents for his wife.

[147] A summerhouse, called The Nest, stands above the Upper Lake, a gift in 1913 to Queen Alexandra from the comptroller of her household, General Sir Dighton Probyn.

[148][s] The gardens to the north of the house, which are overlooked by the suite of rooms used by George VI, were remodelled and simplified by Geoffrey Jellicoe for the King and his wife after the Second World War.

[155] The extensive kitchen gardens, which in Edward VII's time included carriage drives to allow guests to view the "highly ornamental" arrangements,[125][u] were also laid to lawn during Queen Elizabeth II's reign, having proved uneconomic to maintain.

[180] The cottage was no more highly regarded architecturally than the main house; James Pope-Hennessy, the official biographer of Queen Mary, called it, "tremendously vulgar and emphatically, almost defiantly hideous".