Where you can find it?
The kitchen in Apartment 1A, Kensington Palace. You'll need to be part of a guided tour to enter the apartment, and tours run subject to availability. Ask a member of staff on arrival at the palace for more information.
What is it?
An aluminium cooker hood that stands out as the central feature in the pale coffee-coloured kitchen designed in the early 1960s by Princess Margaret’s husband, Lord Snowdon.
What’s its story?
Lord Snowdon, who studied architecture in Cambridge, designed the cooker hood himself and also manufactured a prototype.
According to a contemporary account, Lord Snowdon first ‘drew the hood and made a cardboard model to scale; then he reproduced this in full size. The shape he cut adroitly from photographic paper and pinned it to a batten frame, using sticky tape to keep it together. Afterwards he hoisted the whole thing in place to test it. Such are the pains of creation, he had to break it up again to get it through the kitchen door!’
