Elton John bought Woodside, a country estate in Old Windsor, for £400,000 in 1974, and he has called it ‘the hub’.

Elton John bought Woodside, a country estate at Old Windsor in Berkshire, for £400,000 in 1974, according to Architectural Digest, whose survey of the singer’s properties, updated on 7 November 2025, calls the house his longest-running residence. The magazine places the purchase a year after the release of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, the album that carried “Bennie and the Jets” and “Candle in the Wind”.

The same year and the same price appear elsewhere. Berkshire Live reported in May 2022 that “the Woodside estate cost £400,000 for him back then”, and Hello! gave the same figures in December 2021. Architectural Digest puts the 1974 sum at about £4.2m in today’s money, or $5.17m; Hello! also cited around £4.2m.

Woodside was not his first house. In 1972 he bought a three-bedroom split-level property at Virginia Water in Surrey, named it Hercules and fitted it with a game room loft, a fluorescent pink bathroom and a swimming pool. He sold it in 1976 for £80,000.

‘The hub’

Interviewed at the estate in 2001, the New Zealand Herald reported that “John says Woodside is the hub, the main house”. Architectural Digest has twice used the same word, including in a feature first published in its May 2000 issue, which, introducing Woodside as the first of the four houses it featured, said it was the house “which John calls ‘the hub'”, with English interiors, gardens and “many spare bedrooms for many devoted friends”.

The purchase put John among the musicians buying large English houses in the same period. George Harrison paid £140,000 for Friar Park in 1970 and spent the rest of his life restoring its caves, grottoes and topiary gardens, while John Lennon paid £145,000 in 1969 for a 72-acre estate at Ascot, which he sold to Ringo Starr four years later. The habit ran back further than pop: Winston Churchill bought Chartwell in the week his daughter Mary was born.

Eight bedrooms and an orangery

Architectural Digest lists eight bedrooms at Woodside, along with gardens, tennis courts, a library and an 18th-century orangery. Berkshire Live also counts eight bedrooms, with five reception rooms and a billiard room, and reports that the house was built for a surgeon to Henry VIII.

The orangery, at the end of the drive and next to the entrance gates, was restored by the designers Andrew Protheroe and Adrian Cooper-Grigg. Architectural Digest described it in its 2000 feature as a retreat with no telephones, no television and no pop music, only classical, containing a library for writing letters, a gilded salon for champagne before dinner and a chapel honouring people close to John who had died, among them Gianni Versace and Diana, Princess of Wales. His instruction for the project was “Make it over the top”. Protheroe asked whether he could make it tastefully over the top. “Sure. Why not?” was the reply.

John’s grandmother lived in an apartment in the orangery for some years. “She looked after me when I was starting out,” he told the magazine. “It was my turn to look after her. I used to say to her, ‘Nan, let me make these rooms nice for you.’ And she would always say, ‘No, dear, you save your money.’ After she died, I wanted to create something in her memory.”

Hello! reported that the library at Woodside was formerly a squash court and holds a 19th-century statue of Hebe. It also repeated what Protheroe had told Architectural Digest about the floor: “The floor covering is plaited Norfolk rush that has to be sprinkled with water twice a month to keep it from drying out.”

Rehab, galas and the garden

Woodside has had several renovations, the most notable after John went to rehab in 1990. “When I came out of rehab ten years ago, I realized that life is so much more beautiful than my house reflected,” he told Architectural Digest for its May 2000 issue. “I wanted a normal life, a traditional country house, and Andrew Protheroe and Adrian Cooper-Grigg created that for me at Woodside. Ever since then, I’ve always had a decorating project under way.”

At Woodside he learned the new words to “Candle in the Wind” in the days before the funeral of the Princess of Wales in 1997, the magazine reported; otherwise he did not play the piano seriously at home, keeping performance and practice to the stage.

Accounts of the grounds differ. Berkshire Live gives 37 acres of gardens, Hello! 35 acres and the New Zealand Herald 12 hectares. Hello! described bordered flower beds, water features, a stable for donkeys and ponies, and a life-size Tyrannosaurus rex sculpture called Daisy. Berkshire Live reported that the White Tie and Tiara Ball was held at the house for 15 years, and Architectural Digest that Woodside has been the setting for parties and galas benefiting the Elton John AIDS Foundation.

The purchase year is not quite settled. The 2001 New Zealand Herald interview said the estate was bought in 1975, where Architectural Digest, Berkshire Live and Hello! all give 1974. Either way, the accounts place the purchase in the mid-1970s. Architectural Digest’s November 2025 survey lists it among the properties he owns, and Hello! reported in 2021 that he lives there with his husband, David Furnish, and their children, Zachary and Elijah.