Rosewood Beijing

Before it was Rosewood Beijing, the hotel in Jing Guang Centre, a tower completed in 1989, was the Jing Guang New World Hotel, a property of New World, the group of Hong Kong's Cheng family. In June 2011 New World Hospitality, chaired by Sonia Cheng, agreed to buy Rosewood Hotels & Resorts for US$229.5 million, and a year later Rosewood announced that the Beijing property, owned by New World Group, would become its first hotel in China, with 279 rooms, by mid-2013.

Photo: N509FZ / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

It opened in October 2014, with 283 rooms, as Rosewood's first hotel in Asia. The Chinese business site Huxiu put the cost plainly: a hotel that had been making money was closed for a full three years and cut from more than 400 rooms to 200-odd, the kind of spending, Huxiu argued, that only an owner who also owns the brand can afford. Sonia Cheng, by then chief executive of Rosewood Hotel Group, said it had been "envisioned as an unconventional haven".

The interiors are by Stewart Robertson of BARstudio, in Melbourne, and Hospitality Design read them as a contrast between the city's "impervious exterior" and its "inner sanctuaries". Rosewood's Chinese-language story of the hotel says the design follows the geometry of the classic siheyuan courtyard house. Two bronze Jiao Tu, sons of the dragon, stand at the entrance, and according to Hospitality Design the art and calligraphy of the three-storey lobby were inspired by Bei Dao's poem "Rose of Time". Each room has an original piece of cloisonné.

The hotel stands in Hujialou, in Chaoyang, a choice of district weighed in OKYTO's Beijing guide. The MICHELIN Guide, which gives it two Keys, notes that it calls itself an urban village. What the address gives a guest is a view: many of the rooms look toward the CCTV Tower opposite, which the opening release described as "a shiny-silver architectural statement piece that embodies the nation's grand ambitions".

Sources: Asia Travel Tips; Leisure Opportunities; Huxiu; Journal des Palaces; Hospitality Design; Hospitality Design; HOTELS; Asia Travel Tips; MICHELIN Guide; Wikipedia; Rosewood; Rosewood Beijing