Olga Polizzi
24 February 2020
Insights and inspiration from the legendary hotelier.
Patrick Galbraith
Patrick Galbraith is Editor of Shooting Times, a columnist for The Critic, and is currently writing a book on the battle to save Britain's birdlife.
In the dining room of chic Brown's Hotel in Mayfair, I am sitting with Olga Polizzi, Deputy Chairman and Director of Design of Rocco Forte Hotels. In the shadow of an imposing stone head by Emily Young, we are discussing the decline and fall of Little Chef. The roadside restaurant chain was part of her father’s hotel and restaurant empire before the TV giant Granada’s multi-billion pound hostile takeover in the late nineties.
‘It’s their own fault’, the septuagenarian queen of interior design tells me sharply. ‘I did two Little Chefs. They were actually rather good. We had jam made. We had proper sausages. They said they were going to do this, that, and the other but in fact they did nothing’.
I want to tell her about the time I had nine Little Chef pancakes before a successful cycling race in Scunthorpe but Olga has moved on. ‘I bought those’, she says, gesturing to the heads, ‘when we built a hotel in Manchester. It had a huge atrium, which required some massive pieces, something a bit brash. At the time they were £3000. Now they’re about £300,000 each - always satisfying’.
Olga is evidently fond of Manchester. She recalls that, as a teenager, she was embarrassed by her father, Lord (Charles) Forte, collecting Lowry but ‘bit by bit’ she came to appreciate him. ‘I’ve got three lovely Lowry drawings from my father. I think that if you go to Manchester and look out the window, you can really see Lowry’.
L. S. Lowry, ‘A House’, oil on canvas.
One of Olga’s most recent purchases was an enamel 1940s sign reading ‘ice cream sold here’ – Lord Forte’s first business, which opened in ‘35, was a milk bar on The Strand. She picked it up, she tells me, at the sort fair she really enjoys, with pieces ‘ranging from £50 to £50,000’.
George III mahogany card table.
If you’re out for a canny purchase at The Open Art Fair, Olga thinks you could do worse things than buying a piece of brown furniture. ‘Everyone’s gone contemporary’, she laments, ‘ but I think it’s coming back and it’s worth buying something that has a bit of craft, whether it’s beautiful legs or a lovely top. Not just any old bit of brown furniture - things need to have a bit of a twist’.
Individuality has been her mantra when it comes to the interiors of the 14 hotels in the Rocco Forte collection. Olga believes she’s probably designed ‘more rooms than anybody else in the world’ and is involved right down the minutiae of what sort of lamp sits on what sort of table. ‘I find some wonderful lamps in the fairs’, she tells me, ‘I like to get something that not everyone can buy. If you shop out of a catalogue, it’s available to all’.
While Olga feels the top end of the hotel business is ‘doing pretty well’, she explains it’s got harder over the past few decades due to her customers’ own living standards becoming increasingly luxurious.
So the gap between hotel and home has started to close, I ask? She looks at me doubtfully. ‘The gap has to be maintained. When I started with Rocco Forte, all the showers were above the baths. Now everyone wants a separate shower – everyone wants two basins. Our bathrooms are practically as big as bedrooms’.
But there is more to it than space, Olga believes a good interior must ‘catch the imagination and make someone smile. You need to have a bit of fun. It needs to be a bit unusual’. Frustratingly, however, she feels there’s no such thing as a recipe for hotel perfection but adds, earnestly, that P.G. Wodehouse is essential. She chooses all the books for all the rooms, conscious that they need to be the sort of thing people can ‘look at for ten minutes, have a laugh over, and put down again’.
When it comes to furnishing her own homes - a place in London and a house in Sussex - she goes for ‘middling’ as opposed to ‘very expensive art’. Her latest big purchase was a tapestry by Cornelia Parker, which she bought at Frieze, ‘not this year but last’. Olga tells me seriously that she ‘supposes’ Parker is contemporary but reassures me, Thirty Pieces of Silver, which hangs on her ‘only wall that’s big enough’ is much more traditional.
For somebody so involved in the scene, she is admirably steadfast in her tastes. She doesn't ‘like all the rubbish they have nowadays. The sort of thing where there’s a stone and they explain it’s got some greater motive. You can't look at things anymore and just say ‘gosh that’s beautiful’ and the explanations make me laugh; people spend two pages writing about these stones on the floor or a bit of spit’.
I’m terrible at drawing, I tell Olga. I haven’t got the fine motor skills, which makes me all the more amazed by people who can do it. ‘Well, exactly’, she replies. ‘I always think music is the highest form of art because you and I couldn‘t even begin to do it. When you hear Beethoven you think how did he think of all those different orchestrations coming together in his head’.
As I walk out through the lobby, I can hear jazz drifting out of the bar across the hall and glancing back, it occurs to me that creating a hotel like Brown’s is art at its most intricate.
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