Richie Lea, 59: chalet owner and guitar builder

The early heavy snow is heaven-sent for British expat ski enthusiasts like Richie Lea. His luxury chalet in the Swiss-French Portes du Soleil resort of Morzine-Avoriaz is fully booked in its 10th season and the slopes are enticingly empty ahead of the Christmas rush. The former rock band member is earning additional revenue from a guitar repair business and while chores connected to a chalet build he is overseeing are momentarily keeping him from skiing, Lea's life is otherwise idyllic... Back in the Swinging Sixties, the outlook for Richie Lea was less than promising. Doctors gave the Briton just two years to live if he continued touring with his rock band while enduring the accompanying “excessive lifestyle.” Sensibly, he quit, though the alternatives he tried before later finding a job at British Airways sound just as life-threatening: drag-racing and off-piste skiing.

Lea left boarding school at 16 to become a professional musician, playing bass with a group and "making a few bob.” He recalls supporting David Bowie at the Bournemouth Pavilion in 1969 when the rock star was just getting going with an act called Davy Jones And The Lower Third. “You could tell he had something,” Lea says. After four years of hard touring, Lea suffered a “serious deterioration in health,” which resulted in the doctor’s ultimatum that brought his rock career to an abrupt end.

 
Lea has since found his way to the Portes du Soleil, where he owns and operates holiday chalets in the Morzine-Avoriaz area amid the complex of 12 resorts that straddles the French-Swiss border. On this day, with plenty of snow on the slopes ahead of the holiday crush, he has been held back from skiing by chores connected to the construction of a new chalet he is overseeing. A lorry from the UK carrying furniture got stuck on a slippy road and "I had all the trades in the chalet screaming at each other," he says.
With the lorry now dug from the snow and its vital contents in place, Lea can breathe a sigh of relief. He reminisces while working meticulously to reconstruct a vintage Fender at what he calls his “Hôpital de Guitare” workshop, located in his Morzine chalet. He builds, retrofits and repairs guitars as a sideline business. Looking at him now, there's little to suggest that the Swinging Sixties music scene was almost his undoing.
And were it not for all the guitars - many of which Lea tunes for the local community's children for free (though cured hams and homemade pear brandy are never turned away) – and his recording studio, he might pass for just another chalet owner in a valley bursting with Brits.
 
But Lea stands out from the expat crowd. At 59, he is fondly known throughout Morzine as the effervescent, Duracell-powered Brit with a magnificent luxury chalet who plays guitar rather well and skis even better.
Back in the 1960s there was no stopping Lea either, even after the doctor’s warning. At the age of 21 he left  the UK for the Austrian Tyrol, where he managed to buy a hotel. He ran it - though it sounds like it ran him - in a six-year stretch of 18-hour days. “I think it was more of a change of lifestyle than a rest,” Lea says, smiling. It was in Austria that he developed a taste for extreme skiing in Leutasch near Seefeld with his friend,  the head of the local ski school. Their outings involved “going anywhere but on-piste”.
 
After all this excitement it is hard to imagine Lea in his next job as a purser for British Airways on long-haul jumbo jet routes. It was through BA that he met his wife, Val, on a stopover in San Francisco.  “She was working on the upper deck and I was in business class.” In all, the couple flew together for 29 years, commuting from Geneva to the UK after friends recommended they move to Morzine “since it beats taking the M25 (a highway encircling London that is notorious for its traffic jams)”.
And it was thanks to BA that they saw a lot of the world. They stood on the Great Wall of China together and went heliskiing in Alaska. They even found the time to start a drag-racing team by attending hot-rod races around North America. “I’d race side-by-side against another car over a quarter mile,” says Lea. His wife, he says, was his secret weapon: “She’d keep an eye on the crew and tell them when we were losing the tune of the engine - she had a real knack.”
 
If Lea's drag-racing days are behind him, life is still something of a headlong rush. This winter's first clients are here and demand for his guitar-building expertise risks keeping him from the slopes. He has to find time to train for his latest adrenaline-filled activity: downhill skiing in the French Masters Cup, a top-flight series of downhill races for amateurs.