A Stately Tribute

For Sonia Cheng, the ceo of Rosewood Hotel Group, the debut of the Rosewood brand in Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui — specifically in the Kohn Pedersen Fox-designed Victoria Dockside mixed-use development — is a deeply personal moment.

‘Being in my hometown and located on the very site where my grandfather set out his original vision for the city, Rosewood Hong Kong is a tribute to him and to his lifelong dedication to the betterment of the city. I wanted to build on this legacy,’ she says, referring to Cheng Yu-tung, the legendary founder of New World Development Company.

This explains why the 413-room and 186-residence hotel — ‘a labour of love’ is how Cheng describes it — has had such a long gestation. A project of this scale, and one with so much familial urgency, needed the right address, and in land-scarce Hong Kong, especially if you’re after a patch with harbour and city views, patience and canny jockeying are required.

Taking up 49 levels of the Victoria Dockside skyscraper — a shimmering hulk of irregular stepped massing, glass insets that afford panoramic views, and stone piers — the Rosewood Hong Kong is, besides the smaller Murray that opened last year, the city’s first significant luxury marque in at least a decade.

For New York-based designer and longtime Rosewood collaborator Tony Chi, both the site and the concept presented unique challenges. One of these, he says, was ‘finding new, innovative ways to rethink what a “hotel” could and should be.’

Cheng points to Chi’s ‘depth, breadth and originality of vision’ and the way he can ‘conceptualise a complete guest journey that delivers a lasting impression’. For the Hong Kong property, Chi’s masterstroke was to imagine the hotel as a soignée family home in the air. A ‘ vertical estate’ is how Cheng describes the sprawling yet intimate property that highlights her family’s collective tastes and personal artwork, in addition to newly commissioned pieces.

‘Without being reductive,’ says Chi, ‘ we extended the estate symbolism to everything, from the 40th-floor executive lounge, the Manor Club, to the salons on the guest floors, which are parlour-like gathering places that you’d see in aristocratic homes.’

Throughout the public and private spaces, the application of design features and elements such as hand-cast bronze facades, antiquemirror panelling and ornate wooden marquetry channel a bespoke, layered and sumptuous look and feel. The result is, as Cheng puts it, the most comprehensive expression of her vision for Rosewood, which is to say, a richly textured city bolthole lined in acres of marble and chandeliers, and accoutred with a two-level wellness centre, no less. As familial tributes go, we dare say grand-pére Cheng would have approved.