The Oakhill palace was built in 1910 as a residence for Prince Wilhelm. Since 1926, it has housed the Italian Embassy in Stockholm.
However, the story of Oakhill began almost a hundred years earlier when this land plot was leased to the architect Fredrik Blom and he built one of his prefabricated houses here. Later, the house became a summer residence of the British envoy, Admiral Sir Thomas Baker. He called his house on the oak-covered hill Oakhill.
In 1907, Prince Wilhelm acquired the area and most of the houses were demolished. He commissioned architect Ferdinand Boberg to design a large palace. Boberg created an impressive building with a fabulous view of Ryssviken, Saltsjön and Waldemarsudde. The palace was a wedding gift to the Russian princess Maria Pavlovna from the princess' foster mother, the Grand Duchess Sergius, Elisabeth of Hesse. The construction costs of SEK 700,000 were taken over by the Russian tsar family. In 1908 Prince Wilhelm and Maria Pavlovna got married and in 1910 they moved into their lovely new home.
The marriage did not last long. Maria felt that she had married beneath herself and this caused problems between the couple. In 1914 they divorced, Maria returned to Russia and the palace passed into the possession of their son Lennart Bernadotte. For a long time the palace was empty and in the mid-1920s was hired out to the American envoy Ira Nelson Morris. In 1926, Lennart Bernadotte sold the property to the Italian state. Since then, the palace has housed the Italian Embassy and the residence of its ambassador.
