Inside Rocco Forte Hotels’ Family Dynasty of Design
4 min readThere can be a sense of danger when working with family. Succession and Empire warned of the perils of power struggles, and the Murdochs showed what that could look like in the real world. Rocco Forte Hotels has built its success by ignoring that warning entirely.
Run for 30 years by siblings Lady Olga Polizzi, the deputy chairman and director of design, and Sir Rocco Forte, CEO and chairman, the business has 15 luxury hotels and villas, all with world-class restaurants. Gems include The Carlton, which opened in Milan just in time for this year’s Winter Olympics; the revered Hotel de Russie in Rome; and The Balmoral, Edinburgh’s clock-bearing landmark. Additional properties are slated to open in Sardinia, Naples, and Sicily’s Noto, each manicured with the family-first, detail-oriented Forte touch.
The newly opened Carlton Hotel in Milan.
The dynasty began with Lord Carmine Forte, the wildly successful Italian-born Scottish businessman who, at his peak, oversaw roughly 900 hotels with the Forte Group. When their father’s company underwent a hostile takeover in 1996, the ousted Sir Rocco Forte and Lady Polizzi rallied and regrouped, opening Rocco Forte Hotels.
All three of Sir Forte’s adult children would eventually join the team. Lydia Forte is group director of food and beverage, overseeing all dining experiences while working closely with Fulvio Pierangelini, the brand’s creative director of food; Irene Forte is the collection’s wellness consultant and CEO of Irene Forte Skincare; and their brother, Charles Forte, serves as director of development. (Olga’s daughter, Alex Polizzi, is also a hotelier and host of the British series The Hotel Inspector.) “We represent quite a lot of different customers, actually, within the family,” Lydia says. “We have this very healthy conversation around our personal preferences, because these represent the different types of people you might get in a luxury hotel.”
The Fortes are cautious about the brand getting too big. They don’t want to create the kind of 900-hotel behemoth their family previously held, noting a lack of personalization and design. Yes, they’re adding new hotels to their portfolio, but they’re not looking to become the Hiltons or Pritzkers. “You lose that sense of being a family business. You can’t be connected to the people who work in the business in the same direct way,” Lydia says. “My brother and I choose the playlist. We decide which flowers are going in every space on a weekly basis. My dad’s very focused on service. It’s those details that come together to create the magic. You lose some at scale.”
The exterior of Palazzo Castelluccio.
Today, the family’s collection is considered a crown jewel in the world of luxury travel. Their business is booming, but expansion remains intentional. Many of the hotels are housed in historic buildings, and the design philosophy centers on regional furnishings, materials, and products. “We go to local auctions. We buy British fabrics. We’re doing something in Scotland at the moment, and we buy a lot of Scottish wool,” Lady Polizzi says. “We always try to give a sense of place. Paintings and pictures are rather important, and every hotel is different. You wake up at The Balmoral in Edinburgh, and you know you’re in Scotland—and you wake up in Puglia, and hopefully, you know you’re in Puglia.”
But it is service, Sir Forte and Lady Polizzi say, that remains the most important ingredient to a successful hotel. It’s an art Lady Polizzi considers increasingly endangered. “No one now is looked after properly. You go into a shop, and no one helps you find your size. You try to ring the electric company, and you’re on for hours. You go see a doctor, and they see you for 10 minutes and move on,” she says. “If every whim is answered and you really look after people, that makes a difference. That makes someone come back time and time again.”
Rocco Forte Hotels is turning Noto’s Palazzo Castelluccio into a 31-room hotel.
The entire Forte clan remains close—they still have big dinners together—ensuring that family dynamics are strong. Lydia takes her children to the hotels to see what the family has created, hoping to impart some of the wisdom her father has given her. Her 7-year-old son “worked” in the concierge’s office during a recent stay in Florence. “They’ve got all the Eloise books. We need Eloise at the Hotel de Russie,” Lydia jokes. “There’s a whole magical world of hotels that is fun to be a part of.”
As for her son and daughter one day coming into the business themselves? “It’s so much better to leave your kids a business than cash,” Lydia says. “I learned so much from working with my father. Skills, a way of living, a way of working, rigor. You can’t spend a family business away. I would love to be able to work with my kids. But who knows? They’re so little. We’ve got plenty of time.”
This story appears in the April 2026 issue of ELLE.