Sonia Cheng became chief executive of Rosewood Hotel Group in 2011, the year the group acquired the Texas-born Rosewood brand. She was thirty. The brand she took over was small, respected and largely North American; the group she has built since is global, and its growth has been run property by property rather than by template.
The philosophy predates her and she has made it the group's operating system. Rosewood calls it A Sense of Place: since the brand's founding in 1979, each property is expected to stand as a reflection of its location's history, geography and culture, not as a flag planted on it. Under Cheng that principle has been extended from design into programming: the group's current direction, set out in its own brand announcement, places discovery at the centre, with experiences built around the stories, traditions and people of each place.
The most personal property stands on family ground in Hong Kong. Rosewood Hong Kong opened in March 2019 at Victoria Dockside, on the site of the original New World Centre, a 65-storey tower designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox with interiors by Tony Chi, conceived as a vertical estate. The Carlyle in New York, the Hôtel de Crillon in Paris and Little Dix Bay in the British Virgin Islands sit in the same collection: institutions first, hotels second, which is the point of the philosophy applied at scale.
Cheng's background is the group's own story told from the other side. She is the granddaughter of Cheng Yu-tung and the daughter of Henry Cheng, the Hong Kong developers behind New World, the group that bought Rosewood. Hotels were the family business before they were her job; what she added was the decision to run the acquired American brand as a Hong Kong group's global flagship, and to grow it by acquisition of character rather than by rollout.