During his childhood, the imperial family were frequently on the move. They spent the festive season and winter in Petersburg at the Winter Palace, undergoing the usual round of social obligations and balls, all presented to the world as pageants organised for the entertainment of the Empress, around whom both family and court revolved. There were Christmas trees in the German style (the Empress Alexandra was Princess Charlotte of Prussia by birth) and presents for the children and all their friends. In the first years of the reign, New Year’s Eve was a holiday for the whole town, the Winter Palace being literally open to everybody. More than 30,000 people would be admitted that evening, and many would return home with their clothes torn to pieces by the crowd. [8] Lent followed, and the family moved to the quieter Anitchkov Palace on the Nevsky, which had been their home before Nicholas became Tsar. Next came Easter, the most elaborate celebration of the Orthodox year, and then a few weeks south of the city at Tsarskoe Selo. There they eschewed the enormous Catherine Palace in favour of the neo-classical Alexander, built for Nicholas’s brother when he was heir. The palace was redecorated several times according to their tastes, with an enormous slide being added to one hall so that the children could amuse themselves when it rained. [9] On an island at the centre of the lake in the grounds, there was a playhouse for sunny days. Here few affairs of state intruded on their lives. The Empress, whose health was never very good, relaxed and saved her strength while her husband consciously found time to romp with his children in the evenings.

The Empress Alexandra,  formerly Princess Charlotte of Prussia, whom Konstantin and his siblings were raised to revere as the other-wordly heart of their family. She is pictured in her beloved Gothic Cottage at Peterhof, the symbol of her family life.

“In those days,” wrote one resident of Tsarskoe Selo, “Our favourite occupation was to watch how the children played on the lawn in front of the Alexander Palace. I also remember that every evening this lawn was surrounded by the residents of Tsarskoe Selo who would not miss an opportunity to admire those lively family scenes of imperial life. We were among those people and with avid eyes followed each move of Tsar Nicholas Pavlovich, his Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, and their beautiful children” [10]. 
Poor Konstantin was considered the least beautiful member of this attractive family. Nicholas I was an Adonis, easily the best-looking of the Romanov Tsars, being tall and fair with classical features, and his two eldest girls resembled him strongly. The youngest daughter “Adini” (as Alexandra Nikolaevna styled herself in her early efforts to pronounce her own name) was thought to take after her mother and hence her grandmother, Queen Louise of Prussia, another famous beauty. All three of Konstantin’s brothers – Alexander and then the two younger boys Nicholas and Michael who were born a few years after he was - grew up to be taller than he. He was deemed “small and ugly” by his own father [11] and described by observers as “an ugly likeness” of that same father, having a “sallow” complexion, “sand-coloured” hair and “an enormous wooden-looking nose in place of his father’s Grecian outline” [12] To judge from his photographs, these accounts are not quite fair. Konstantin had bright, intelligent eyes, a chiselled profile that compared favourably in middle age with his brother Alexander’s puffy features; and unlike most Romanov men he kept his thick blond hair into his fifties. 
In summer, the family moved usually to Peterhof, where they had a house on the shores of the Baltic. Completed in 1829 when Konstantin was two, the Gothic “Cottage palace” was regarded by the imperial family – and particularly by the Empress - as their true home. It was designed by the Scottish architect Adam Menelaws, and is full of rich colour, with parquet and friezes throughout, lace and velvet curtains, thick carpeting and elegant wooden furniture decorated with the rose and sword motif that the Empress had adopted as her own. As in the family rooms at the Alexander Palace, the impression created is of both luxury and simplicity, with plenty of light and none of the stifling clutter that characterised houses built or decorated later in the century for their descendants. The Cottage stands at the top of a meadow looking down towards the Gulf of Finland, and was of such modest size that before long they had outgrown it. When Konstantin was 14, the Russian architect Andrei Stackenschneider was commissioned to add extra rooms to the house and at the same time convert some of the outbuildings for the use of the Grand Dukes. Thus the former Guardhouse – another Gothic structure – became the Konstantin or Admiral’s house, while the old kitchen buildings and stables were adapted into a school for his younger brothers. There was also a schoolroom on the first floor of the Cottage itself, and a covered balcony where the children learned to fence and played when young if it was raining outside [13]. The Cottage stands in the Alexandria Park, named for Konstantin’s mother, which adjoins the main Peterhof estate and under the auspices of Nicholas and Alexandra was developed from imperial hunting grounds into a romantic idyll of woods, ruins, rivers and bridges. There was even a private church, the distinctly un-Orthodox looking Gothic Chapel, dedicated nevertheless to St Alexander Nevsky and filled with icons and Russian art. The main ceremony of summer was the Empress’s birthday party, at which hordes of Russians and foreigners arrived by boat from the capital to enjoy fireworks and dancing around the grounds of the Grand Palace.
Konstantin’s parents loved him publicly and privately, and encouraged all their offspring to enjoy outdoor play and lack of ceremony, but he was not to have an easy upbringing. “I wish to make a man of my son before I make an Emperor of him,” Nicholas once said sternly, discussing his educational plans for his elder son [14], and this did not equate to allowing either indulgences or real freedom. When the boys overstepped the mark, they were soundly beaten, often by their father himself. Alexander was both lazy and diffident, so Nicholas broke his spirit; and people who knew Konstantin as an adult felt that his own self-assurance concealed a core of fear: awe of the Emperor born of fear of the first Emperor he ever knew, his father. [15] 
He was a boisterous little boy whose family seized with rather blinkered pride upon apparent early signs of interest all things military. Other character traits would be played down or smoothed – even beaten - out: as a younger son, he was to serve his country and his brother in the traditional martial manner.    
“Here are some toys in the uniforms of different troops of our Army, which I am sending to your Constantine,” wrote his Aunt Anna Pavlovna (the future Queen of Holland) to Nicholas when “Kosty” was barely four. [16] But it was for the Navy specifically that the child was destined, since the Navy had been neglected in recent years, and his father had a special 

fondness for it for its association with Peter the Great and the founding of modern Russia. Konstantin was to be brought up to preside over a regeneration of Russia’s sea power.

Portraits of Konstantin as a baby often showed him in naval uniform already, allowing no doubt as to his chosen career - or who had chosen it for him.

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