FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA
WHO
One of the great directors of his generation, Francis Ford Coppola is also a publisher, winemaker, restaurateur and hotelier.
WHERE
Coppola lives in California’s Napa Valley, and has hotels in Belize, Buenos Aires and southern Italy.
WHAT’S NEXT
In addition to other projects, Coppola is currently restoring Inglenook, his legendary Napa Valley estate, to its former glory, and opening it to the public. (No overnight stays for now, but we’re crossing our fingers for the future….)
August, 2014
As a filmmaker, Francis Ford Coppola is a legend — the director of theGodfather trilogy, Apocalypse Now and The Conversation, to name just his most iconic works. What’s less well-known is that Coppola is also someone who seems to have some very compelling, almost fantasy-inducing notions of what comprises a well-rounded life. In addition to his work in cinema, he is the publisher of a literary magazine, a winemaker, a restaurateur and — most important for the hotel geeks among us — a hotelier. In fact a fascination with hotels seems to run in the family. The Park Hyatt Tokyo is as much a star of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation as Bill Murray or Scarlett Johansson is. And her later film Somewhere, whose title captures the sort of blurred sense of place in a life spent largely in hotels, is set almost entirely at West Hollywood’s legendary Chateau Marmont, with a memorable cameo from the Principe di Savoia in Milan.
As for the senior Coppola, he got his start as a hotelier at the Blancaneaux Lodge, whose Belizean rainforest setting reminded him of the locations he used in filmingApocalypse Now. Fortunately, life at Blancaneaux Lodge is quite a bit more leisurely. Before it became an upscale eco-lodge, this was Coppola’s vacation home, and his aesthetic sensibility still shines through. From the outside it’s a rustic-looking place, a series of thatch-roofed bungalows tucked discreetly into the forest, yet everything feels perfectly composed. And needless to say, despite the challenges of operating in such a remote location, the food and wine are extraordinary.
Whereas the appeal of Blancaneaux Lodge is largely its immediate proximity to the natural world, Coppola’s Buenos Aires hotel, Jardin Escondido, feels decidedly urbane. What they share, however, is a connection to one of the director’s films, and a past life as one of his homes away from home. Coppola lived in the Palermo Soho townhouse that now houses the hotel while shooting Tetro in 2008, turning the home into a six-room guest house shortly afterwards. For a hotel owned by an icon of the film industry, it’s a remarkably down-to-earth place, a discreet little hideaway surrounding a simple, sunny courtyard garden that’s bursting with plant life.
Out of all of Coppola’s hotels, Palazzo Margherita is the one that seems most personal. A 19th-century palazzo located in his family’s ancestral southern Italian hometown, it’s meant as a living homage to his grandfather Agostino Coppola’s legacy. There are claw-foot tubs and hand-painted ceiling frescoes, but more than the trappings of luxury, it’s defined by an atmosphere of easy, Italian-village-style relaxation — a simpler, sincerer version of the sweet life, and one that’s well worth getting a taste of if you can.
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