A Family Affair

On a visit to the Coppola family's low-key Belize retreats with botanical skin-care expert Athena Hewett, Arati Menon discovers what homegrown hospitality is all about

- Arati Menon

AT THE VERTIGINOUS edge of a rock face, I find a wooden chair and sit down. Below, a creek snakes its way downstream. Ahead, an impenetrable tangle of pine forest is home to all manner of bird and beast. It's not hard to understand what drew director Francis Ford Coppola to this cinematic corner of western Belize, where in 1981 he bought a derelict hunting lodge. It soon became a family retreat and later, Blancaneaux Lodge, a 20-room hideaway loved by in-theknow adventure seekers.

For Coppola's own children, Blancaneaux Lodge was a paradisiacal coming-of-age setting. "I'd hop around on rocks and swim in the river with my brothers," recalls his daughter, the director Sofia Coppola. "I feel so lucky to have had these jungle adventures." It was this deep connection with Blancaneaux-and Belize-that she wanted to channel in a collaboration with Monastery, a San Francisco-based botanical skin-care company with a devoted international following.

Athena Hewett, the esthetician and founder behind Monastery, shares the younger filmmaker's fondness for forests. "I used to suffer from severe acne, and as a skin specialist, that caused me great anxiety," says Hewett when we meet at Blancaneaux, where she is training the spa staff on her facial techniques. "So I took myself on an Eat, Pray, Love trip to Indonesia and spent a lot of time in its rainforests-and my skin cleared up." Returning to San Francisco, she turned to botanicals to formulate her first product: a cleansing oil with anti-inflammatory ingredients.