The woman who reads a retreat like a protocol

Jessica Rachelle

BSN, MS, Certified Clinical Research Professional

Ask Jessica Rachelle what she does and you get two answers, and it takes a moment to see they are the same answer.

The first is clinical. For sixteen years she has worked in research, beginning as a coordinator and now owning Altus Clinical Research, a South Florida site running Phase I through Phase IV trials for the pharmaceutical industry. Treatments tested there are prescribed every day.

The second she gives more quickly. Long before she founded anything, she was the friend people called about travel, not for restaurant lists, but for the architecture of an entire week. She would spend hours on a place she had never been, learning what happened there, what it was actually known for, where people who lived there ate on a Tuesday.

She does not consider these separate skills. A protocol, she points out, is only a sequence designed so carefully that nothing in it is accidental.

Casa Faro is that idea, applied to five days.

Faro means lighthouse. The name is the promise: a fixed point, and a way back. Casa Faro runs two retreats a year, in one place at a time, for men and women together, a decision most of the category has quietly avoided.

Each retreat is built on five elements. Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Akasha, the fifth, which the old traditions called the space the other four move through. They are not decoration. They are the structure the week is designed against, and every element of every day answers to one of them.

The result is a week where nothing is accidental and nothing is there because it photographs well. Guests leave changed forever. That is not a tagline. It is the specification.