A trio of sisters took over Cornwall's Bedruthan Steps hotel from their parents in 2002. Last year, they launched the Scarlet, a luxury eco-hotel next door

Rebecca Whittington We have a large, complex family—until 2002 there were eight siblings or half-siblings with shareholdings and non-executive positions. In 2002, we worked out who wanted to work with whom and what we wanted to do. The three of us were younger than the rest and wanted to do mad things like build a hotel.

Emma Stratton It became clear that three of us wanted to open a new hotel, while others wanted things as they were. So we organised a share-swap and bought the Bedruthan Steps from the others. We drove around the UK and Europe, looking for a site for a new hotel, but couldn't find anything. We finally found out that the Tredragon hotel near the Bedruthan was up for sale and we bought it quickly.

RW Of the three of us I stayed away from the family business the longest. I worked for 3i and Booz Allen Hamilton and did an MBA. I came back to working in the family business after the restructuring. I felt there was an opportunity for me to make a mark.  

ES Only once we had the site did we think about the sort of hotel we wanted. It has to be able to survive financially, but it's more important that we create something that makes us proud. We built the hotel we always wanted to stay at, with friends or with our husbands.

Deborah Wakefield My day job as operations director at Bedruthan is to keep it going successfully so we can finance the Scarlet loan. But I also keep an eye on operations at the Scarlet, from a shareholder's perspective. My strength is in delivering a particular style of caring for guests. It's not obsequious, but is warm and genuine and friendly. Great service like this is the one thing money can't buy.

ES We picked things we really liked from lots of hotels around the world. We wanted to match luxury with warm and friendly service. We found that a lot of well-designed hotels offer a professional but cold service. And luxury has never been coupled with sustainability before.

RW All three of us has a strong feel for design. I was fortunate in that when I came into the business Debbie was busy with the operational side and Emma was doing marketing and sales. So I picked up the other bits and that included design. We shut Bedruthan and did a major refurbishment and I took the lead in designing that.

DW We all have a strong sense of design and the arts. The family is very artistic, our father was an architect. Rebecca is the design director and is responsible for the Scarlet. I am very pleased with what she has done there. Would I have liked to do it? Yes. Did I want to trust Rebecca to do a good job? Yes. But it's the bit I miss the most. It's the fun bit.

ES We generally tend to agree, and argue over tiny things. With the Scarlet, no one could agree on the name. We originally wanted
a Cornish name, but after discounting thousands of names, Scarlet snuck though. The holding company name is called Red Hotels and it came from there.

DW We can get on each other's nerves from time to time, but in the long term there is a closeness. There is a commitment that comes from it being a family business. The one thing I bring that we all do is a passion and commitment you rarely find elsewhere.

RW The best thing about us working together is that we have a shared set of passions. Because we've grown up in the same environment we share a desire to cherish the world and run a sustainable business, and to look after our employees. The trade-off is that because we are working together we have more separate lives outside of work and don't see as much of each other socially as we would do otherwise.

DW We challenge each other and broaden each other's horizons. But we all have an incredibly determined gene and while that's great when we are all facing in the same direction, it can be difficult at the beginning of a project when we might all have different ideas. But once we get moving on a project we tend to look back and think, 'well that wasn't so bad'.

ES Launching the Scarlet has been like having a baby with three mothers. We'd never done a build before and people kept saying, 'you can't do that'. We were continually taking decisions against other people's better judgement. But this hotel shows there is another way, and if it changes the way people think about hotels then it's all for the good.