Sarah Ferguson, often called Fergie, is well-known for her history of impulsive spending, famously accruing debts exceeding £3.7 million by 1994.

Nicknamed the ‘Duchess of Excess’, she reportedly indulged in extravagant purchases for staff, vacations, parties, and floral arrangements, often accumulating significant debts at stores like Harrods without paying.

Possibly the most extravagant of Fergie’s expenses was Sunninghill Park, the imposing marital home she shared with Prince Andrew in Ascot, Berkshire.

This 12-bedroom mansion, reminiscent of JR’s Dallas ranch Southfork and nicknamed SouthYork, was sold in 2007 to Timur Kulibayev, related by marriage to Kazakhstan’s former president, for £15 million.

Recently uncovered details of the grand property reveal the Duchess’ exceptionally large marble bathtub, humorously referred to by builders as ‘HMS Fergie’.

Andrew Lownie’s revealing biography about Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, titled “Entitled”, offers a vivid depiction of Sunninghill during its heyday.

The lavish 5,000-acre mansion, ‘surrounded by eight-foot walls’, was said to have contained ‘its own helicopter landing pad, a cinema, pool room and swimming pool, and 20 rooms of staff quarters’. 

Deemed a ‘huge expense’ for both the Duke and Duchess of York, Sunninghill took four years to complete, having been initially gifted to the royal couple by the late Queen as a present for their 1986 wedding. 

Requisitioned by the American Ninth Air Force squadron of fighter pilots during World War II, the home had initially been earmarked for a young Princess Elizabeth and her fiancé, Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten after their 1947 marriage.

But during renovations, a workman in the library dropped a cigarette and the entire building went up in flames. Despite dozens of firemen battling to save the mansion, it was raised to the ground.

Yet, the Duke and Duchess enthusiastically welcomed the late Queen’s gift and poured millions of pounds into extensive renovation works to Sunninghill Park, which sat on the edge of Windsor Great Park, offering lakes, woodlands and gardens.

Indeed upon entering the upmarket haven, dubbed the ‘home of the York’s dreams’, it was clear that not a single expense had been spared in its construction, Lownie outlined.

Guests were immediately greeted by a 35-foot-high stone floor hall, which ‘rose to a glass dome and minstrels gallery’, while the lobby was ‘adorned with a medieval soldier’s helmet from Windsor Castle and the head of a North American buffalo’.

The living room, fitted with a large fireplace, featured embroidered cushions that bore the entwined initials A and S, while a ‘huge glittering chandelier, which had cost £12,000’, hung in the red and white dining room.

Discovered after walking up the mansion’s ‘curved staircase’, the couple’s master bedroom boasted an expansive four-poster bed and mint-green canopy, alongside ‘one of the world’s largest walk-in wardrobes’, measuring 100 ft by 50 ft.

A spare room was decorated with ape-covered wallpaper and dubbed the ‘Money Room’, while the downstairs toilet contained a musical loo-roll holder that was believed to have played ‘God Save the Queen’. 

 Other unique features that highlighted the Duke and Duchess’ unparalleled  expensive taste included 12 installed phone lines, blast-proof plastic walls, bedrooms containing panic buttons, and even a bomb shelter.

Towels, flannels, hand soaps and even toilet paper were said to have been ’embossed with the initials A & S’ while, according to Lownie, the annual cost of guarding the house alone came to a whopping £300,000. 

And, in what was described as ‘Aladdin’s Cave’, one room was ‘piled from floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes’ that held gifts from the Royal couple’s numerous trips, alongside some of their two-thousand wedding presents.

The boxes contained 24 antique-silver serving dishes costing between £1,500 and £8,000 each, 36 silver and condiment sets, 1,000 crystal glasses and even 300 vases costing up to £600 each.

However, while the 18th-century home’s extensive renovations were eventually completed, according to Talk TV’s Royal Editor Sarah Hewson, they had begun to spiral out of control after Fergie’s extravagant spending broke the couple’s budget and eventually forced the Palace to withhold funding.

Work had begun on the newbuild, the first Royal newbuild since Bagshot Park in 1879, however it immediately sparked controversy over its design, by architect Dunbar Naismith. 

Ms Hewson explained: ‘They tweaked and reshaped the designs over and over again, much to the frustration of their architect.

When Prince Philip, never one to mince his words, saw the plans, he described it as looking like a “tart’s bedroom”.’ 

 The mansion had also sparked controversy after it was revealed it had been built in a conservation Green Belt zone, with several residents forcibly evicted from their homes on ‘security grounds’, according to Lownie. 

And Fergie was said to have caused an even greater uproar within the Firm after commissioning American designer Sister Parrish, who designed the White House, to decorate the property.

After receiving a quote of £1million, the late Queen complained that the cost was too high and forced the Duchess to switch to British designer Nina Campbell. 

She was reportedly given a budget of £250,000 – almost half a million today – to cater for the couple’s long list of demands, which included a panic room, cinema room, helipad, swimming pool and tennis courts.

‘By this stage, Sunninghill Park was proving to be a financial headache,’ added Hewson, ‘in particular, for the Queen, notoriously financially prudent who was having to foot the ever-escalating bills.’

Then, instead of accepting the decision, Fergie looked around to find another way to earn the money. She came up with another way to fund her dream home, inviting Hello! magazine in to do a lavish photoshoot.

‘Fergie had a very enterprising idea that she would do a photoshoot for Hello!’ said Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty Magazine. ‘Nobody in the royal family had ever done a shoot like that.’

‘Although the Queen never commented publicly on it, she was less than pleased,’ added Hewson. ‘She saw it as lacking decorum that it was an invasion of privacy. Prince Philip, he just thought it was downright tacky and distasteful.’ 

Speaking on a Channel 5 documentary released earlier this year, titled ‘Fergie, Andrew & The Scandal of SouthYork’, Lownie explained how the Queen ‘eventually put her foot down and said, you know, this is crazy’. 

Describing her decision to eventually cut off the purse strings, he added: ‘At that point, they hadn’t built the swimming pool and the tennis court, and who knows whether the helicopter pad was there then either.’

The Duke and Duchess finally moved into the incredible mansion on October 5, 1990, throwing a huge housewarming party with a jungle theme. The incredible spectacle included fake animals popping out of the bushes, waitresses in leopard skin and Elton John performed Your Song.

The Royal couple mingled with A-list guests that included Billy Connolly, Pamela Stephenson David Frost and Imran Khan.

Yet such descriptions of Sunninghill Park, which outline the vast property in its most lavish and extravagant form, are a world away from what the mansion would eventually become. 

After Prince Andrew and Fergie’s high-profile divorce in 1996, the Prince eventually moved out of the purpose-built mansion, while the Duchess, Princess Beatrice and Eugenie remained living at Sunninghill until 2006. 

Then, after spending five years on the market, the property was eventually purchased by Mr Kulibayev in 2007, who controversially paid £3million more than the asking price. 

Despite the millions spent on its renovations, the property was eventually demolished in 2015, having fallen into a state of disrepair after lying completely empty for eight years.

Just 25 years after the Duke and Duchess moved in, the once-lavish mansion was no more. In its final years, the property had been compared to a Tesco superstore and even had bats roosting in the roof.

Work then began to construct a new, lavish home in its place in a project that, according to sources, cost close to £18million.

Mr Kulibayev spent an overall cost of £33million on acquiring and redeveloping Sunninghill Park. As of 2024, its sprawling replacement remained unoccupied.