Jasmine Scalesciani-Hawken was lingering on a beach in Baja California Sur, Mexico, basking in the serenity of the ocean before her. Her husband, the environmentalist Paul Hawken, was at a local conference, and Scalesciani-Hawken had a little solitary time. Suddenly, she was enveloped in a wistful childhood memory of Sardinia.
“It was very wild and beautiful,” she says of the Italian island. As a child of Europeans, she foraged the untamed landscape of Sardinia as her playground and natural teacher. Adding to the enchantment was her family’s elegant Sardinia home, perched on a rocky cliffside and designed by now-renowned architect Alberto Ponis, a friend of her parents, to blend seamlessly with nature. In life’s rear-view mirror, it strikes Scalesciani-Hawken today that her childhood experiences were the foundation of wellness and, eventually, her lifelong career as a wellness coach.
After 25 years as a wellness-industry expert, including stints as a creative director, Scalesciani-Hawken has landed on her life’s ultimate work: the design and operation of Nua Nakui (“to nurture the well”), a wellness residence, or center, in El Pescadero, a small farming village in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur.
Nua Nakui, as pristine in architecture as it is in practice, is a small center devoted to Ayurvedic retreats. Clients from around the world partake in natural body treatments and, when desired, private fasting. Two gleaming white buildings, separated by a swimming pool, form the property’s center.
Set on an eight-acre herb farm, Nua Nakui is fertile ground that cultivates medicinal plants. Mature olive trees are filled with birds, bees, and butterflies. A block from the Pacific Ocean and backed by the Sierra de la Laguna Mountain range, Nua Nakui is a storybook picture of the natural world at its best: raw yet elegant; pristine yet wild.
It wasn’t always so beautiful. At the beginning, Scalesciani-Hawken says, the area was filled with trash: “I took huge trucks to the dump because of the plastic,” she says. She also spent three years regenerating the soil by growing alfalfa to remove pesticides.
Today, she and her staff oversee flourishing fennel, artichokes, and Italian sage. “We grow the herbs, pick them, and make teas, elixirs, beautiful creams, infusions for baths,” she says. It is all in the tradition of Ayurvedic medicine, an ancient holistic approach to physical and mental health. Scalesciani-Hawken’s clients typically spend a week or longer “to reset their body and mind.”
Scalesciani-Hawken designed Nua Nakui herself. Although she is self-taught in design, her background prepared her well. “I grew up surrounded by design, creative fashion, and architecture,” she says. She worked with an engineer to draw plans, and took it from there. “I sourced everything. It was a huge step into an unknown.”
Stones from surrounding land make up much of the center’s structure, which is “100 percent off the grid,” Scalesciani-Hawken says, as well as stepping stones into the pool. Mountain water is filtered for use, and solar panels provide power. Through her exploration of the area, she found onyx stones in a quarry, left from a building project in Mexico. In Nua Nakui, it forms one entire bathroom. “I wanted a crystal-like feeling,” she says.
The outdoor living space is also onyx, glimmering at dusk in the candlelight of beeswax candles placed in carved nooks. From a daybed, clients can watch the sun set over the ocean. Sometimes, her guests will pick their own herbs for a special outdoor bath. “The bathroom is the heart of the home,” Scalesciani-Hawken says. “Ayurvedic treatments encourage caring for your body and resting.”
Near the pool, an enormous staircase takes clients to an outside deck, where they can watch the pattern of the sun and moon, and gaze on farms and the Pacific. Under the staircase is a cove where clients rest and sip tea. The individual client rooms are bathed with indirect light, furnished with handmade items meant to help the nervous system rest.
For Scalesciani-Hawken, operating Nua Nakui is more than bringing wellness to clients: “It is about being custodians of the earth.”