It could be disconcerting for some if a Golden Retriever jogged in during a meeting, but it’s par for the course at Rosewood London, where Pearl has been a feature of the hotel pretty much since day one, getting her name from Pearl Assurance Company, who the Holborn building was originally created for.
Pearl seems genuinely unphased by the comings and goings at the hotel – she must feel secure that managing director Michael Bonsor has it all under control. He started in August 2013, just weeks before the hotel was opening, and his first full hotel opening at that, plus it was a beast - with 306 rooms, two restaurants, spa and significant events space.
But it was always Bonsor’s destiny. His first job was helping his parents at their hotel in Inverness, “probably from an illegal working age” he laughs, “cleaning toilets and making beds” and it opened his eyes to the world.
“Put it this way, the area isn’t that diverse – kind of white and Scottish – and most of my friends were not meeting people from Europe, let alone Japan, so I loved it. We also travelled a lot whenever we could as a family – staying in nice hotels, so I kind of got used to that,” he says.
He was lucky enough to go through school very clearly knowing what he wanted to do and never steered from that, although he did toy with pursuing architecture or interiors, but as he says, both are things he can now appreciate as part of his role.
In 2000, he left Inverness at 18 to go to hotel school at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, one of the country’s key avenues for such a career route. Then it was an inadvertent meeting with someone at Four Seasons Park Lane that started his real journey into work.
“I was down in London at Claridge’s for an interview at another hotel in America, but I wondered around town on a break; I found myself in the hotel chatting to the person who was in charge of HR! Within a few weeks, I graduated and had a job offer at Four Seasons Boston so off I went. I loved it – what a great city just to ease into the American way of living," he says.
The role was in stewarding, back of house, rubber gloves on, washing pots – “it was like being back at my parents’ hotels”, he jokes. But of course it was integral to progression, and hotel GM Robin Brown soon became a great mentor for the young Bonsor.
