Hong Kong Homecoming
Hong Kong
Homecoming
Rosewood’s new flagship redefines the art of hospitality
The Rosewood Hong Kong hotel opened this year as the brand’s flagship property—its twenty-sixth, including Paris’ famed Hôtel de Crillon, New York’s historic Carlyle, and the Mansion on Turtle Creek, where Rosewood first received guests on a private Dallas estate forty years ago. Despite Rosewood’s world renown, Hong Kong still holds special significance for its owners.
FAMILY MATTERS
Sonia Cheng’s family has owned the land at Victoria Dockside for three generations. She remembers pedaling her bicycle along the water here as a little girl, the views across the harbor to Hong Kong Island’s jagged skyscrapers and towering peaks. Long before that, it had been a key shipping terminus and railhead on the mainland, until Cheng’s family turned the centrally located promontory into a park and cultural center. So there’s a particular tenderness to her voice as she describes their newest venture here.
“With Hong Kong evolving from a business and financial center to becoming a true global cultural capital,” says Cheng, CEO of Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, “I wanted to create an iconic property that not only showcases the city’s rich history but also reflects its bright future.”
At the epicenter of Kowloon’s business and entertainment district, the Rosewood Hong Kong is a destination in its own right. A water front promenade designed by the architects behind New York’s High Line connects the hotel to K11 Musea, an innovative office space with high-end retail, dining and art venues designed to lure young creatives. A few steps further lie the Hong Kong Museum of Art and Cultural Center, and the shopping mecca of Canton Road. A few blocks inland, a more local-style business district will satisfy even the hungriest Instagrammer.
Inside, meanwhile, the hotel is a model of Rosewood’s residential approach to luxury and creating “A Sense of Place”. Materials varying between mineral tones and metallics dispel any notion of institutionality. The service is obliging but never obsequious. The experience is more that of a lavish penthouse than a large hotel. And indeed, the Rosewood Residences are designed for extended stays. Guestroom floors greet you at the elevators with spacious salons, where you can relax with a book before retiring to your harbor-view room or gather with friends before going down to dinner. The eight bars and restaurants offer contemporary takes on Cantonese and international flavors, and private rooms for family-style service.
“Rosewood Hong Kong sets bold new benchmarks for design, guest experience, cuisine, and culture,” says Cheng. “Our ambition is to create a new world standard for ultra-luxury hospitality and a focal point of the vibrant Hong Kong lifestyle, reflecting its incredible dynamism, style and diversity.”
Neo Tokyo
Neo Tokyo
Unlock the algorithm that turned a millennium-old village into the city of the future.
You travel around Tokyo as if in a Matrix. One minute you’re jostling through Shinjuku under giant TV screens. The next, the neon maelstrom pixelates like a rip in the code. It crystalizes again in a garden court at Meiji Shrine, surrounded by swooping greens and soft blossoms. And then again amid the futurist fashions, luxurious mineral and metallic hues of Omotesando. All before lunch.
Surprise the senses
Welcome to Asia’s original megacity—the style-scrambling model for Singapore, Seoul, Shanghai, and others to come. You are gaijin, a foreigner. You vaguely recall the familiar (dis)pleasure of air travel, baggage claim, customs from not long ago. A white-gloved cabbie. After that, things get blurry. (Must be the jet lag.) But there’s a soothing sense that protocols here known only to locals keep the turbulent life of Tokyo running smoothly beneath the surface.
In the pink and blue dawn, forklifts bang and whirr at Toyosu Market delivering sofa-sized tuna and 400 other saltwater delicacies bound for Japanese kitchens. The daily auction proceeds amid metallic clamor with the solemnity of a Sotheby’s art sale—and prices to match. Beneath Shibuya’s stacked glass-box malls, determined tides of shoppers and commuters flow and merge in a seamless choreography with little more than an electrostatic hum. In the labyrinth of brutalist concrete streets so complex that people give maps instead of addresses, tiny, warm-wooded soba shops glow with rice-paper doors and deep porcelain bowls of rich umami broth.
Serene summit
Above it all, the Park Hyatt Tokyo hovers like a faceted spacecraft visiting from yet another dimension. Brought to fame by Sofia Coppola’s 2003 Oscar-winning Lost in Translation, the hotel stands shoulder-to-shoulder with more recent arrivals in terms of both style and service. The Park Hyatt can claim, in all modesty, to be the standard by which top-end Tokyo hotels are measured.
The attentive, caring staff will welcome and help orient you in this strange, new world. Whether at arm’s length, taking in the panorama of the city’s algorithms from The Peak bar, or in the field on a tailored tour through Ginza’s galleries and luxury flagships. Or into Roppongi’s frenetic, nighttime underbelly. Or something else entirely: to learn calligraphy, say, in a school situated where laundry lines windows and few foreigners go, to see how Tokyojin live behind the scenes.
Savor the service
In between, come back to yourself. Soak in the view of Mt. Fuji and Park Hyatt’s penthouse pool and spa. Wander the recesses of your mind and the cosseted library. Feast all your senses at afternoon tea in the bamboo garden or on fine dining—haute French at Girandole, contemporary Japanese at Kozue, and Kobe beef at the appropriately 52nd-story New York Grill and jazz bar.
“There’s a soul to the place,” says F1RST founder, Fernando Gonzalez. “From the General Manager all the way to the bellboys and housekeeping. The lighting, the books and art in the rooms—it all tells you there’s an incredible depth to the place.”
Subcultures and superlatives
Beyond, lies a city of “mosts”. The world’s most populous—as big as California. Its safest too. With the most Michelin stars—twice those of Paris. An economy the size of Italy. A budget bigger than Saudi Arabia. No surprise then that this vastness offers a ward for every subcultural fetish. Akihabara for geeks and gamers. Harajuku for pink pop punk. Asakusa for the 7th-Century Sensoji Temple. Pokemon kawaii cuteness on billboards, roadblocks and bullet trains to everywhere. The offer will soon expand even more with new neighborhoods built into Tokyo Bay to cater for the 2020 Olympics.
Welcome to the fishing village that became the greatest city on earth.
