'I want to change people's opinion of me': Tamara Ecclestone reveals her new project

Tamara Ecclestone is doing some building work. It’s not only her new £45 million mansion that’s getting a complete overhaul, but her pampered princess image as well. The daughter of billionaire F1 boss Bernie, she wants for nothing money can buy, but will her new reality TV show earn her the public respect she craves?

'People think I'm content to live off my dad's money. It's a shame their opinion of me is so negative,' says Tamara Ecclestone

What does a girl whose daddy is worth in excess of £2 billion do? Well, Tamara Ecclestone is going into the construction business. Project one – the total refurbishment of her new £45 million home in Kensington, West London. And project two – constructing a new image for herself. Out with the ‘socialite’, ‘It-girl’, ‘party princess’ and all those other phrases that basically mean pampered airhead. In with the career girl.
Both Ecclestone overhauls are taking place on camera, in the form of a reality television show, Tamara Ecclestone: Billion $$ Girl, which airs on Channel 5 in November. The cameras are already following her everywhere, even today on our photo shoot. In the show we’ll watch Tamara doing up her new house using an interior designer flown in from the States and an army of builders. While the renovation may take two years, in some ways project two – the rebranding of Tamara Ecclestone (daughter of the 80-year-old Formula 1 titan Bernie and former model Slavica, herself worth £734 million, and big sister to socialite Petra) – is the more challenging.
The problem is that, like it or not, with her father a multibillionaire, Tamara is completely loaded. We meet at her Chelsea pad where she’s lived for the past five years and has a Ferrari parked outside, a driveway turntable so she doesn’t have to reverse her car, an atrium pool, a statement staircase, acres of marble and silk and various staff hovering about. Tamara is in pink fluffy slippers, track pants and vest top and carries her latest pooch – her fifth, a chihuahua called Duke – under her arm. She’s just bought him a ramp to help him get on to her bed, she says. She puts Duke down for a second to have a sniff of some shampoo samples from her forthcoming haircare range. ‘Oh, now look! I’ve got hairy boobs!’ she suddenly exclaims.
I survey the scene and ask, if Tamara really wants to change people’s opinion of her, is a reality television show the best way to do it? ‘Everyone thinks I’m a lunatic for doing the show. At first my mum said, “Are you crazy?”’

From left: Tamara with her father, Formula 1 impresario Bernie; with boyfriend Omar Khyami at Petra’s
post-wedding brunch in Rome last month;  with Petra (far right) prior to the wedding

I agree with her mum. Reality television, as everybody now knows, can make even the gentlest souls look like buffoons. Why do it? ‘I’ve been asked to do a reality TV show so many times. I was too young before and I didn’t really know what I was doing with my life. This offer came in and I thought, “I’m in a really good place and I know career-wise where I’m going, so why not let the cameras in?” I think there are so many misconceptions about me.’
She then goes on to spell these misconceptions out: that she is vacuous, stupid and spoilt. ‘It is hurtful when you’re constantly being put down. So I was like, “You know what? I need a right to reply.”’
Stupid and vacuous we can dispel right here; after all, Tamara has four A-levels at A grade, speaks three languages, and is both witty and self-aware.
The spoilt charge is harder to live down. The way she sees it, her dad worked hard for his money and has every right to give some of it to his children. It wasn’t her dad who landed her current modelling contract with lingerie firm Ultimo (in fact, she admits, he’s probably not too chuffed about it – after all, ‘it’s not nice to see your kids in their underwear’). Neither did he set up her haircare business or raise £600,000 for Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital by organising a fundraising ball last July.
Anyway, Tamara is 27 now, more than old enough to look after herself. Whatever her parents think, they don’t meddle.
‘They’re actually not overbearing psychopaths,’ says Tamara. ‘They have let me get on with my life. They’re confident I’ll be able to make the right decisions, so they’ve never really said to me, “Hell no, you’re not doing that.” The only thing they didn’t want me to do was drop out of university.’

Tamara, however, dropped out twice. ‘I think they realised telling me not to do something doesn’t work. I didn’t want to be there.’ Her dad got her a job on the sales floor at Armani on West London’s Brompton Road – on £12,000 a year. Then she enrolled on a TV presenting course. Her fluent Italian got her work as a presenter on Sky Sport Italia. Obviously the F1 connection helped – but a TV presenter who can’t present gets found out fast.
Tamara is currently dating 37-year-old stockbroker Omar Khyami and, although they’ve been together for little over a year, she talks about him as if she’s gearing up for the long term. (They were recently seen house-hunting in LA, where she was also promoting her TV show in meetings with top studios.) But has her parents’ split – they divorced in 2009 after 24 years of marriage – tarnished her own view on marriage?
‘It definitely does make you think about it – that maybe things don’t last for ever. I don’t want my parents’ divorce to make me cynical, but at the same time it was such a horrible thing to go through. I wouldn’t have wanted to put my children through that, but it happens. A lot of people have said to me it must be easier them getting divorced now I’m an adult, but I’m not sure that’s true. I sometimes think that because you’re so used to seeing your parents together, the shock of them not being together is so much greater.’
Her father now has a girlfriend, Fabiana Flosi, who at 31 is only a few years older than Tamara,
and initially she was reluctant to meet her. ‘I definitely have a better relationship with my dad now. I have to say that I am closer to my mum, whether or not that’s a girl thing or because she doesn’t have a partner, but there’s no bad feeling. I get it – my dad’s moved on, that’s fine.’
So does she have much of a relationship with Fabiana? ‘Not massively,’ she concedes, ‘I mean, my dad is very good about the fact that he can have a relationship with me that is separate from theirs and I respect him for that.’
Her parents’ divorce, she insists, is old news – especially since wedding bells have been ringing in the Ecclestone household. Her sister Petra’s ostentatious wedding to businessman James Stunt took place near Rome last month, with Tamara as maid of honour.
‘I still can’t believe that my 22-year-old sister, who I look at as a baby, is married and living in Los Angeles.’
Petra has bought the mansion in Beverly Hills built by the late Dynasty creator Aaron Spelling, which is renowned for having so many rooms that one of them is used solely for wrapping presents. (While in LA recently, Tamara’s boyfriend cheekily revealed that the property he and Tamara were looking for would make Petra’s ‘look like a guest house’.) Having moved in to such an enormous pad, Petra is plainly thinking of family. As the older sister by five years, Jane Austen novels would have it that Tamara must be getting broody, too.
‘Sometimes I feel fat or get a spot, sometimes I row with my mum
and I cry. I want people to realise we all have the same worries’
‘My sister’s so different to me. She wants a family, she wants babies, she’s a home person. I want that too, but I definitely want my career first. My boyfriend and I talk about getting married, I do want a family, but I wouldn’t want anything to take the shine off my sister’s year. Maybe next year.’
Petra’s Rome wedding sounded like the very height of romance. But marrying an Ecclestone gets a man several million more things than just a beautiful bride. Suffice to say that Tamara presumes a prenup will have been one of the wedding gifts.
‘I don’t want to speak on Petra’s behalf, but she’s smart, so I’m sure that (the prenup) is sorted. People have tried to suggest  things about James that are completely untrue, but he’s lovely. He’s not a gold-digger, he’s a businessman in his own right. Anyway, it’s not about that – I think that you should always protect yourself. I know people might say that’s unromantic but that’s just reality sometimes.’
Harsh old ‘reality’ again. Crumpled in front of me on the sofa with dog hair all over her, the ‘real’ Tamara Ecclestone, though still irrepressibly divine, looks very different to the primped and pampered princess as seen in the glossy mags. Will Tamara Ecclestone: Billion $$ Girl show every side?
‘Well, obviously I’m not editing the series, but I will say that it’s not scripted, it’s not fake. I couldn’t bear (the ‘augmented reality’ show) Made in Chelsea. It seems very staged. My show is completely different. People will be seeing me first thing in the morning, last thing at night and everything in between. Sometimes I’m very made up for a photo shoot, and sometimes I’m ill and look like a piece of s**t. Sometimes I feel fat, sometimes I get a spot, sometimes I have a row with my mum and I’m crying. I just wanted people to realise that we all have the same worries.’

She’s right, up to a point – we do all have some of the same worries. Not all of them, though. One worry Tamara will never have, for example, is how to pay the electricity bill. Truth is, she doesn’t really need to work at all.
‘But how dull would life be just doing nothing! I love going on holiday, but then I’m itching to get back because I’ve got so much going on with the show, with Ultimo, with my shampoos. I love being busy. My dad’s a workaholic. I’ve got that too.’
To keep her busy now there’s the renovation project – the house bought for her by her mother, who got hundreds of millions in the divorce settlement. Slavica has given her daughter a generous piece of prime real estate in Kensington Palace Gardens, one of the most sought-after roads in the country. ‘Basically, I know this is the house where I’m going to have my children and be there for ever, so I’m in the process of doing it up with that in mind. It’s a whole massive revamp – they’ve just started stripping everything out. They’ve said 14 months, though I don’t believe that. But it’s fine because I want to make it perfect.’
Once the walls that can be pulled down (the house is listed) have been, what Tamara calls ‘the fun stuff’ – picking the furnishings and ornaments – can begin. She is having LA-based interior designer Gavin Brodin flown in to help.
‘The thing I want most is a garden. At the moment I don’t have one, so I can’t wait to enjoy the one in my new house. It’s going to have a fire pit and a barbecue and be a great outdoor space for my dogs.’
‘I definitely have a better relationship with my dad now, but I am closer to my mum’
Inside, the look she’s going for is ‘comfortable, but not gaudy in any way. No gold taps. Gavin and I will be going on [buying] trips around the world. We are going to Paris for Maison & Objet [an upmarket international interiors fair] and then he’s taking me to Italy to look at different things. I don’t want this project to be a case of, “All right Gavin, you go and pick it.” I want to be part of the process. And that’s not all she has her sights on. One statement acquisition that is currently being sourced from the Amazon is crystal for a £1 million bathtub. ‘And there’s so much that I want in terms of art. There’s a Tracey Emin: it’s basically of a girl in a dress surrounded by all this money [Emin’s I’ve Got it All, 2000] and to me the dress means more than the money. I really want that somewhere in the house.’
She hasn’t bought the picture yet, but she knows that won’t be a problem, assuming Charles Saatchi is open to offers: it’s in his gallery.
The house will also contain ‘a massive dressing room. Mirrors everywhere, so I can see how fat my bum looks before I go out and have it written about in the papers!’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘Basically the dressing room is key to me, that’s definitely my favourite room in the house. My clothes are very important to me.’
That much is evident when it comes to her wardrobe. ‘I have loads of designers I love – Alaïa, Julien Macdonald, Christian Louboutin and Jimmy Choo for shoes. However, I also like shopping on the high street – I love French Connection, they do great dresses.’
The dressing room will also have to find space for her collection of over 200 handmade Hermès Birkin bags. They start at £4,200 each, with some worth as much as £80,000. Yet Tamara insists they are not just a rich girl’s baubles. ‘My mum says it’s an amazing collection and one day
I can put it in Christie’s – so it’s not something I’ll ever lose money on. I do look at things like that.’
The question is whether seeing all of this on TV – the huge house, the Birkin bags, the five dogs, the staff – will improve anyone’s perception of Tamara Ecclestone. Will the really big construction project – her image – ever get finished?
‘People think that I’m not driven, that I’m not motivated to make my own way in life, that I’m just content to live off my dad’s money. It’s a shame that a lot of people’s opinion of me seems to be so negative. Maybe that will change. Maybe as I get older, people will take me more seriously and realise that I am trying to be a businesswoman in my own right, and give back, wherever I can.’ 

Tamara Ecclestone: Billion $$ Girl will start on Channel 5 in November

Exclusive photos of Tamara