The VERY lavish spending secrets of Britain’s richest couple
SHE says her life is ‘amazing’ and if the pictures she posts on social media — of family, friends, parties and holidays — are anything to go by, who’d disagree?
Then again, Kirsty Bertarelli, a former Miss UK who was born in Staffordshire, is one half of Britain’s wealthiest couple.
According to the latest Sunday Times Rich List, she and husband Ernesto are worth £11.5 billion and are considerably wealthier than the Queen (a mere £330 million) and J.K. Rowling (£600 million). Their fortune was made in biotech and pharmaceuticals — Ernesto’s family business.
But how do you go about spending even a fraction of such colossal wealth . . ?
NOT SO HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
YES, she was once a beauty queen with an Eighties bubble perm, but Kirsty (née Roper) has never been less than privileged.
Her family owns Churchill China in Staffordshire and she was raised with brother Nick and sister Julie in a beautiful house in the market town of Stone, with horses, dogs and panoramic country views.
She went to boarding school in Wales and had a holiday job in the family factory. ‘I enjoyed painting the plates, but I never wanted to be in the family business,’ she has said. ‘All I wanted to do was sing.’
Kirsty left school at 16 and a year later had a near-death experience when she caught meningitis.
She attributes her phenomenal drive to succeed to this traumatic event. She began modelling — while waiting for her musical career to take off — and took part in various beauty pageants. In 1988 she was named Miss UK and was ‘second’ runner-up in Miss World.
A trust fund bought her a flat in Chelsea where she ran with a moneyed crowd, including Nineties It- girl Tamara Beckwith, former Jimmy Choo tycoon Tamara Mellon, and De Beers heiress Emily Oppenheimer — all still close friends.
In 1997, she met Ernesto, a Swiss Italianborn member of the family who owned the pharmaceutical company Serono.
Kirsty, now 45, recalled that she couldn’t take her eyes off ‘a very beautiful, dishy man. I was swept off my feet’. She says family values united them. ‘Ernesto has similar values to me — he is from a loving Italian family where the kitchen is the heart of the home. My [three] children love staying with their grandparents, and Ernesto really enjoys Staffordshire. He goes to the pub with my dad and helps with the barbecue.’
HOME IS WHERE THE HELICOPTER IS
THE Bertarellis spend winter in their vast, £20 million ultra-modern glass house in the ski resort of Gstaad, Switzerland, complete with helipad, lake and underground garage. Formula 1 tycoon and fellow billionaire Bernie Ecclestone, is a neighbour.
There are two kitchens, one for the chef and one for Kirsty, who cooks three times a week and does Sunday lunch. However, she leaves the clearing up to others. ‘People deal with that,’ she says.
They have another huge summer home on Lake Geneva. And don’t forget the £ 10 million London house in Belgravia, with its gym and cinema.
Kirsty says she wants her children — Chiara, 16, Falco, 13, and Alceo, 11 — to experience the ‘same sort of childhood I had, because it’s such a blessing’.
YACHT TO TURN PHILIP GREEN
THE largest yacht ever built in the UK, the Vava II, is Kirsty and Ernesto’s £100 million, 315ft long private party palace. They spend several months a year on board, with a crew of 30 looking after them and their guests. There is a helipad, a swimming pool with an adjustable bottom to vary depth, and a ‘ fold- down beach club’ where Kirsty and her guests do yoga. Recent trips include Indonesia, Alaska and the Caribbean.
342-CARAT SOCIAL LIFE
FOR a woman who says she rarely goes out and favours early nights, Kirsty’s social life is ‘blinging’. She was among the guests, for instance, at
ex-Pirelli model Christina Estrada’s three-day 50th birthday party in Abu Dhabi in 2012 which saw guests flown in on private jets.
She is close friends with jeweller Caroline Scheufele of Chopard, and was among the select crowd invited to marvel at the suite of diamonds created from the 342 carat ‘Queen of the Kalahari’ diamond in Paris in January.
The Bertarelli family are forever on the move — with frequent trips to St Barts, Basel, Alaska, Belize, Sicily and Sardinia.
PARTYING WITH A PRICE TAG
KIRSTY’S 40th birthday party in 2011 was quite an event, with Ernesto hiring a waterfront estate on Five Star island in Miami Beach at a cost of £2.5 million. The invitations read ‘Dress code: Glamorous extravaganza’ and celebrations went on until 5am.
More recently, when daughter Chiara turned 16. the occasion was marked with a no-expenses-spared trip to Paris for the teenager and friends. No boring queuing at the Louvre, though: the girls posed outside designer Elie Saab’s shop and at the Valentino fashion show.
THE NUMBER ONE HIT SINGLE
KIRSTY was a songwriter before she married — writing the No.1 hit, Black Coffee for the British girl group, All Saints — and longs to top the charts in her own right. yet, for all her wealth, success eludes her. A 2014 album, indigo Shores, did not trouble the UK charts. Her record label Decca said last week it had ‘no idea’ if she was still one of its artists. She took a break from music after getting pregnant with eldest child Chiara, but continued to write, and her debut album Elusive was released in 2010 and did well in the Swiss music charts. She has just finished recording another album after months of costly studio sessions in London, apparently paid for at her own expense.
THIS SPORTY LIFE
KIRSTY has gyms in all her properties and likes to ‘ walk up mountains and ski down . . . i do a lot of exercise.’ She runs, cycles, plays tennis and scuba dives.
Diet-wise, she avoids wheat, dairy and sugar, and drinks little alcohol. ‘i suffer from migraines so i can’t drink too much, which is great.’
DESIGNER TOGS AND BEAUTY
KIRSTY’S tastes are very low key — at least in Gstaad terms. She loves J Brand jeans (£140), isabel Marant boots (£400) and affects a rock chick look. However, there are occasions when she dresses up in Tom Ford and diamonds. Kirsty once told told an interviewer that although she is one of the few women in the world who can afford haute couture, she tends to steer clear.
‘i don’t need it. We don’t go to any balls,’ she said.
As for beauty maintenance, there are the tousled, sun-streaked locks to maintain at just the right shade of blonde and there is surely the suspicion of Botox about her perfect brow.
in 2015, she admitted: ‘i have done it. But to sing you have to be able to move your face, so i don’t have too much.’
SKY HIGH FEES AT SCHOOL OF KINGS
ALL three Bertarelli children are believed to attend institut Le rosey in rolle, Switzerland, which is known as the School of Kings. Alumni include the former Shah of iran, Prince rainier of Monaco and King Farouk of Egypt, plus a clutch of rothschilds and hedge funder Arpad Busson.
it’s also the world’s most expensive school, at £80,000 a year. From January to March, the students and staff move to their Gstaad campus — for the skiing.
THE SAILING CHAMP HUSBAND
ERNESTO, 51, has twice won the America’s Cup, a feat which some say may have cost him £80 million. No doubt he believes he has earned the right to indulge himself.
He took over the family firm, Serono, in 1996 and more than doubled its revenue by changing its focus from pharmaceuticals to biotechnology, largely thanks to its discovery of a pioneering drug to treat multiple sclerosis.
Serono was sold to another drugs company, Merck, in 2007 for $13.3 billion. Now, managing his investments is a full-time job.
But let’s leave the last word to Kirsty, who says of her lovely life: ‘i feel so lucky that i fell in love and i’ve got a family. it’s beautiful. i have to pinch myself. To have such a beautiful home, a beautiful boat — the whole thing’s a fairy tale.
‘But it’s not as if i came from rags to start with.’