IRENE FORTE ON LOVE, LIFE & LEARNING FROM HER HOTEL TYCOON FATHER SIR ROCCO

INVITING US TO HER FAMOUS FAMILY'S SURREY ESTATE

- BELINDA ROBEY

For someone whose father is one of the most famous hotel magnates in the world, fellow entrepreneur Irene Forte isn't very good at kicking back and relaxing.

“I take what I call ‘workations', when I work from nice places,” says Sir Rocco's 32-year-old daughter with wife Aliai, welcoming HELLO! to the Forte family's 1,800-acre Surrey estate where the charming five-bedroom Ripley Cottage, in the grounds of the main house, is the place Irene calls home when not in London.

It was here the founder of beauty brand Irene Forte Skincare and her then fiancé, technical entrepreneur Felix Winckler they have since married decamped when the first lockdown hit, along with her sister Lydia, brother-in-law Dimitri Chandris and their young son Johnny, as well as her brother Charles and his girlfriend Georgie.

“It was a family decision that we would all be together," she tells us. “Then the first weekend, my sister went down with Covid and three days later, my dad, then me, so we all ended up isolating in different rooms."

"Once we were able to all hang out, though, it was lovely. Before the pandemic, I was traveling three times a week for work, and I had done that for years. So to have that much quality time with the family and to get to see so much of my young nephew was really nice."

Few could have guessed back then that we would only now, 18 months later, be regaining the freedoms lost to us during the pandemic.

It's a subject about which her 76-year-old father, the founder and chairman of Rocco Forte Hotels, which has properties across Europe, China and Russia, has been very outspoken, calling the lockdowns "nonsense" and saying there had been “a huge over-reaction” to the outbreak.