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Nobody Planned This: Three Women Behind Some of Britain and Ireland's Most Singular Hotels
- Emily Goldfischer
- 8 hours ago
- 8 min read
A fashion buyer from Italy, a music journalist from Manchester, and an entrepreneur with a string of successful exits behind her. None of them set out to run hotels. At a Relais & Châteaux showcase in London, all three landed on the same answer about what makes one work.
The Relais & Châteaux UK and Ireland delegation gathered in London recently to showcase nine of its 27 member properties, all of them privately owned, most of them family-run, and each with a backstory no brand playbook could produce. Just 35 of some 600 applicant properties made the cut last year, according to Fiona Malan, Relais & Châteaux's regional director of member services. Between champagne and caviar, hertelier spoke with three women whose routes into hospitality could not have been more different, and whose philosophies, it turns out, could not be more alike.
The Queen of the Castle
Giorgia Bosetti did not come to England to run a Tudor castle. She came to learn English. Back in Italy she worked in fashion, and when she arrived in London she took a restaurant job to pay her way through language classes. As her English improved, she faced a choice: back to fashion, or stay in an industry that sat somewhere between an office job and real, face-to-face human contact? She chose hospitality, started on reception at The Bailey's Hotel on Gloucester Road in London, and worked her way up, including through every single Covid lockdown. "I was on the closure team, so I moved through different departments," she says. "It gave me good fuel."
From Hotel du Vin in Bristol, she was recruited as front of house manager at Thornbury Castle in Gloucestershire, the only Tudor castle in England where guests can stay overnight, in rooms once walked by Henry VIII (he honeymooned there with Anne Boleyn). Today Bosetti is acting general manager, leading a team of 70 across 26 rooms in a Grade I listed building with spiral staircases and not a single elevator. Her team's nickname for her dates back years: the Queen of the castle.
She is candid that men opened doors for her. "I've worked alongside many men who believed in me, in what I was able to deliver and in who I am," she says. Her advice to women hoping to build those alliances is to stop waiting. "Don't wait for the right moment to come. Sometimes the right moment arrives as a challenge, and that's where things happen. The real experience comes on the floor, where you're pushed and where you learn."
Now, with a largely female head-of-department team around her, her measure of success has shifted. "If my team succeeds, I succeed," she says. Even her fashion past has resurfaced: Thornbury's wildly popular Tudor dress-up experience, complete with photographer, was her gamble. "I'm going back to the fashion industry," she laughs, "in a Tudor era."
The Two Days a Week That Never Happened
Zoe Cunliffe spent her twenties in London being paid to write 50 words about nightclubs for Mixmag and DJ Mag. "It was basically sex, drugs, and rock and roll," she says. Then, in 2000, she and her husband Barney moved to the Lake District to join his family's hotel, Gilpin, an Edwardian country house outside Windermere with one of hospitality's better full-circle stories. The house belonged to Barney's great-grandmother and was sold out of the family in 1968.
Barney's parents, John and Chris, met at catering college and worked everywhere from the Waldorf Astoria in New York to luxury hotels in Jamaica and even Number 10 under Margaret Thatcher, before buying the family house back in 1987. Barney suggested Zoe help out. "He said, why don't you just come in for a couple of days a week? That was it. Full time, seven days a week, ever since."
Surrounded by trained hoteliers, she made a decision that shaped everything after. "I didn't want to be the wife who came in and just told everybody what to do. So I did every department apart from cheffing and gardening, because I would kill people." When the hotel needed a new website, she taught herself to code rather than try to explain her vision to someone else.
Gilpin has grown from 14 rooms to 36 across two properties a mile and a half apart, a couples-only retreat (no weddings, no business groups, no children under seven) with a Michelin-starred restaurant, a pan-Asian one, and a series of spa lodges and suites the family invented years before "private wellness" became a trend. Every one of those developments came from talking to guests, including the most personal conversations of all.
The Cunliffes spent eight years going through IVF before their daughter, now 18, was born, and the family's openness about it started with her mother-in-law Chris, who came running into the office one day announcing she had the number of the best IVF specialist in the country. "But I've not told them anything about you," Chris assured her. "I said to Chris, right, you're in your sixties, you have two adult sons, and somebody's just randomly given you the number of an IVF specialist?" Cunliffe recalls. "And she went, okay, I told them everything."
With no young children at Gilpin, many guests are couples quietly struggling to conceive, and Cunliffe ended up having hundreds of conversations with them over the years. That openness eventually shaped Gilpin's Magical Wellness Hideaway, designed for guests recovering from IVF, cancer treatment, or simply a brutal year, who want privacy rather than a glitzy communal spa.
How does a four-way family business survive working and living together for decades? Well defined territory, mostly. "We all have our own individual areas of expertise," she says, and when ideas collided, "we'd bounce off each other, argue about it, then have a glass of wine, and agree or disagree." Being owned by nobody helped. When Barney proposed putting private hot tubs in the new garden suites in 2006, everyone thought they were mad. The suites ran at 97 percent occupancy from day one. John died in 2020 and Chris in 2023, and a new chapter is taking shape. Two years ago the Cunliffes hired their first general manager and stepped back from the day-to-day for the first time in over two decades, and their daughter, off to university to study psychology, will sit in on board meetings to learn the business that will one day be hers. Whether she runs it is up to her: "I just want her to feel that she has a proper choice."
Behind the scenes, Gilpin employs 120 people and owns more staff bedrooms than guest rooms, around 70, including a converted farmhouse and three former B&Bs in Windermere, because staff can't afford to live in the Lakes otherwise. One team member's entire job is looking after everyone else's wellbeing, and Cunliffe lights up most when she talks about the young people who arrive at the hotel for their first job. "They come in without confidence, and you watch them blossom," she says. "They're engaging with so many different types of people, and the way that builds them up is incredible. Giving somebody that little boost to go out into the world is so satisfying." After 26 years, her conclusion is simple: the best food, the best of everything, counts for nothing "if the people aren't right."
From Fresh & Wild to Kenmare Bay
Tara Meehan had already built businesses most entrepreneurs would retire on before hospitality found her. With her husband Bryan she co-founded Fresh & Wild, the London organic grocery chain sold to Whole Foods, and Nude Skincare, launched with Ali Hewson and her husband Bono and later sold to LVMH. Then she got restless. "I decided I wanted an adventure, so we moved to California," she says. There Bryan bought and grew Blue Bottle Coffee, which Nestlé acquired in a deal reported at around $500 million.
Ireland came next, and sideways. Looking for a family base near where Bryan's father grew up in County Cork, the Meehans bought an ancient Irish oak rainforest estate near Glengarriff. The Park Hotel in Kenmare, an 1897 railway-era grande dame half an hour's drive away, happened to come up for sale. It sits in a position most hoteliers would trade a limb for: Kenmare Bay and the mountains on one side, barely a building in sight, and the pastel-fronted town (a dozen pubs, a handful of churches) at the end of the drive on the other. It had been family-run for four decades, and its owner was choosy about succession. "He wanted a family to buy the hotel, not a consortium," Meehan says. He met their three daughters and made up his mind.
Two and a half years on, the Meehans have rehung the hotel with their own 30-year art collection and are methodically renovating it in sections, with Tara leading alongside a designer. The family runs through the place: one daughter, a chef, spent a summer in the hotel's pastry kitchen and has just written her first novel, which has Tara already imagining an authors' series at the Park; another, an artist, has work hanging in the collection.
To introduce themselves to Kenmare, the Meehans threw open the doors for a community day in January. It poured. Six hundred people came for oysters, champagne, tea, and cake. Now there are nightly art tours, monthly music sessions with the likes of fiddler Martin Hayes, and a new general manager, Grace O'Connor, an Irishwoman the Meehans lured home from Sydney, where she'd spent five years running the 500-room InterContinental opposite the Opera House. Recently the hotel's young waitstaff came in dressed to the nines to celebrate a colleague's 21st birthday with their first cocktails at the Park. The Meehans quietly picked up the bill. "We love our team," Tara says. "They're just such great people."
This August the Park Hotel Kenmare opens a strikingly modern SÁMAS Spa designed by Jo Nagasaka of Schemata Architects, the architect behind Blue Bottle's much-admired cafés in Japan and Korea. "Japan and Ireland have a similar feel," Meehan says. "The scenery, the soft air, the culture around bathing."
The ambition, Tara says, is for the Park to be "a place of culture and a place of community," with the programming growing out of whatever the family genuinely loves: first the art, then the music, lately singalongs in the bar ("turns out lots of people love to sing, but they're too shy"). The spirit of the place, though, is best captured by a small detail in reception: a clock that shows the time of high tide, because Tara sometimes takes guests down to swim in the bay with her.
The Through Line
Michael Caines MBE, chef-patron of Lympstone Manor and the Relais & Châteaux delegate for UK and Ireland, gave the room the honest market read: bookings are more last-minute, members nearest London are feeling it most, and staycations are picking up the slack. Interesting times, even at the top end of luxury.
Which makes it the more striking that none of these three women, asked what makes their hotels work, talked about the market. They talked about their teams, and about building places where their people shine. Bosetti put it best, and it would make a decent motto for the whole association: "You don't need to be the star. You need to create the environment for other people."
