From the world stage to luxury real estate: Ivona Brnelić for Journal.hr

Some careers follow a straight line. Ivona Brnelić's does not, and that is precisely what makes it compelling. From winning the Miss Yugoslavia title in 1990, to nearly a decade performing alongside Tina Turner, Cher, and Beyoncé on the world's biggest stages, to co-founding one of Croatia's most distinguished luxury real estate agencies, her path is one of those rare transformations where art, intuition, and business converge with uncommon ease.

The interview she gave to Journal.hr offers a candid look at the thinking behind those transitions, and at the way a career built on performance has come to shape her vision for Remington Real Estate, the exclusive Christie's International Real Estate affiliate in Croatia that she co-founded together with Ivan Kovačić.

Brnelić describes her departure for London in 1991 as a leap taken on instinct rather than calculation. She did not overanalyze it. She simply knew it was something she had to do. That same instinct carried her through years of working at the highest levels of the entertainment industry, performing at events such as the Grammys and the American Music Awards alongside names including Tina Turner, Cher, and Beyoncé.

What left the deepest impression, she says, was not the scale of those productions, but the way the artists behind them worked. The level of dedication, precision, and energy was something she could not have learned from a distance. It had to be lived. Those standards, she makes clear, she carried directly into her next chapter.

Interior design was always present in the background of that performing life, explored mostly through her own projects – first a flat in London, and later through the development and design of a residential-commercial building in Rijeka. The career on stage simply did not leave room for more.

Then the pandemic arrived, everything stopped, and for the first time she had the space to give that other side of herself the attention it had long been waiting for. She used that period to deepen her interior design education, and it was precisely out of that stillness that the idea for Remington Real Estate began to take shape.

Together with Kovačić, who brings over two decades of experience in real estate investment and project development, Brnelić co-founded the agency and secured the Christie's International Real Estate representation for Croatia.

The partnership at the heart of Remington works, she says, because she and Kovačić come from genuinely different worlds that complement each other naturally. He brings the business architecture and the transactional expertise; she brings the creative intelligence and the spatial sensibility.

Luxury, in her view, is not a price point or a postcode. It is an attention to detail so complete that the space functions without effort, where every element has been considered and nothing is superfluous.

Looking ahead at the Croatian luxury market over the next five to ten years, Brnelić sees a necessary shift in how development is approached, and she sees Remington as an active participant in driving that shift.

And for those thinking about a radical career change but held back by fear, her answer is characteristic: do not push it away. Embrace it and try to see it differently.

If you would like to read the full interview, click the following link: Journal.hr