NXG PR OFILE


Hospitality is second nature to Lydia Forte, the award-winning hotel heiress who is taking her family business into the 21st century, as she explains to James Beech


with a style Service


O


nly 24 hours before Lydia Forte graciously accepted the CampdenFB Top Family Business Rising Star award on stage at the European Families in Business Awards in Madrid, she had put the finishing touches to her family’s new £3 million ($3.9 million) refurbishment in Edinburgh.


“I was at our Balmoral Hotel where we had the first day of


opening to the public of our new restaurant, which has been a long time in the making,” explains Forte, the group director of food and beverage at Rocco Forte Hotels. “It is a collaboration with Alain Roux, and his father


Michel Roux, to do a brasserie for us using authentic Scottish produce there.” The restaurant was reinvigorated by hip interior designer


Martin Brudnizki and Olga Polizzi, Rocco Forte Hotels’ director of design and Lydia’s aunt. The opening heralded the completion of the family’s five year refurbishment of the five- star hotel. “It was very exciting to see the Balmoral finally


transformed, it was a huge refurbishment at work so I had to be there for the first day,” she says. Just as there is the historic Auld Alliance between Scotland


and France, the Forte family have a generational connection to the highlands north of the Scottish border. Her great grandfather came to the United Kingdom from a


tiny village just south of Rome in 1912 with her grandfather Charles, born Carmine, who was then three-years-old.


ISSUE 74 | 2018


Left: Lydia Forte, group director of food and beverage at Rocco Forte Hotels


“


It is very important to have a focus and to really build a wealth of knowledge around that focus and that direction, so that when you come into a family business, you can be very respectful and learn from the people that have all of this experience before you


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