Welcome to the T List, a newsletter from the editors of T Magazine. Each week, we share things we’re eating, wearing, listening to or coveting now. Sign up here to find us in your inbox every Wednesday, along with monthly travel and beauty guides, and the latest stories from our print issues. And you can always reach us at [email protected].
Stay Here
A Guesthouse With an Art-World Pedigree
Sils Maria, a village in Switzerland’s Engadine valley, about six miles from St. Moritz, is famous for its diamond dust — sparkling ice crystals suspended in the winter air — and the cultural heavyweights who’ve visited over the centuries, including Nietzsche, Proust and Faulkner. It also has a new draw: the renovated 16th-century guesthouse Chesa Marchetta, which has been reborn as a 13-room hotel covered in sgraffito, a decorative etching technique found across the Engadine. The new owner is Artfarm — the hospitality company founded by Iwan and Manuela Wirth, the co-founders of the Swiss gallery Hauser & Wirth — whose other properties include the Fife Arms in Braemer, Scotland, which opened in 2019, and the Hotel Castell in neighboring Zuoz, acquired this summer, along with restaurants and farm shops in London, New York, Los Angeles and on Minorca. At Chesa Marchetta, the guest rooms are furnished with antiques, many of which are made from local arven (Swiss stone pine), a fragrant high-altitude wood known for its calming properties. The restaurant, where gallery co-founders Iwan and Manuela Wirth dined on their first date in the ’90s, is headed by the chef Davide Degiovanni, whose menu riffs on Northern Italian and Swiss specialties, including his nonna’s gnocchi. At a weathered barn turned lounge, elaborate cocktails are on offer, among them the Alpine Juniper, made with tequila and alpine botanical cordial, garnished with oak moss marshmallows. Chesa Marchetta opens Jan. 2; from about $568 a night, chesamarchetta.ch.
— Adam H. Graham
Covet This
A California-Inspired Chocolate Bar Made in Collaboration With Ed Ruscha
The Beverly Hills, Calif.-based chocolate company andSons regularly collaborates with artists, museums and galleries on creative confections. So when its co-owners, the brothers Marc and Phil Covitz, set out to make a chocolate that captured the essence of their home state, they turned to the artist who has long been its most laconic chronicler: Ed Ruscha. This December, andSons and Ruscha will launch Made in California, a bar named for a 1971 Ruscha lithograph of the same title, which is reproduced on the handcrafted box. Ruscha painted the phrase in gel-like squiggles, as if squeezed from a confectioner’s piping bag. The andSons chef Sandy Tran’s recipe for the bar channels California’s landscape with blood orange olive oil and a sprinkling of sea salt in a dark chocolate base. Each one is cast in a handcrafted mold tracing the topography of the Central Valley, resulting in an edible homage to the Golden State’s geography and its art of self-reference. It’s available in a limited edition: Only 300 bars have been made. $295, and-sons.com.
— James Draney
Eat Here
A New Destination Restaurant on Paris’s Île Saint-Louis
The Île Saint-Louis in Paris has been better known for Berthillon ice cream and postcard views than for destination dining. That will change this month with the opening of Cypsèle, the first restaurant from the Polish-born chef Marcin Król, who started his career at Noma in Copenhagen at 19 and most recently spent three years cooking alongside Sota Atsumi at the 11th Arrondissement restaurant Maison. “We were going for an unexpected and interesting location,” says Król, who describes the area as the crossroads of hipster town and old money. “It’ll be an exciting clash of worlds.” Partnering with the sommelier Quentin Loisel, formerly of the Paris restaurant Le Jules Verne, Król created a tasting menu that celebrates the best of French products and whole-animal cooking, and built a wood-fired rotisserie station so diners can watch the preparation of dishes like quail-and-foie-gras pithiviers served on a bed of pine needles, or sweetbreads baked in sourdough. The London-based firm Nice Projects restored the space’s original 17th-century boiserie, adding a floor of hand-cut mosaic tiles and a sinuous ceiling light fixture that nods to the neons of Król’s favorite Parisian tabacs. Cypsèle opens Nov. 19, cypsele.fr.
— Lindsey Tramuta
Smell This
A Perfume That Evokes the Scent of New Zealand’s Manuka Honey Harvest
Gabrielle Mirkin, founder of the manuka honey line Activist, and the Bodha perfumer Emily L’Ami — both New Zealand transplants in Los Angeles — first bonded over a kindred interest in the botanical world. When L’Ami took a course with the British Society of Perfumers last year, inspiration struck for a fragrance collaboration. “This interspecies scent researcher was talking about how beekeepers become obsessed with the smell of a healthy hive,” she says. It’s a layered bouquet that she describes as “waxy and resinous and floral, a bit animalic.” L’Ami texted Mirkin from class, and they began dreaming up a perfume in homage to New Zealand summer, when beehives are set out among the scraggly manuka trees in time for the annual bloom, resulting in an herbaceous honey varietal prized for its antibacterial properties. But at the start of 2025, as Mirkin was about to return from the harvest, the Palisades Fire engulfed her family’s house in Topanga Canyon. The shock of grief was immense. Her husband, Luke Harwood, had spent a decade restoring the landscape with native sycamores and sages; they’d converted the previous owner’s art shed into the Activist studio. As the couple and their children settled into a borrowed cottage, L’Ami sent care packages from nearby Pasadena with tiny vials of raw materials, like neroli or sweet myrrh, as a means of both connection and escape. The final perfume, called Beeswax, folds in notes of orange blossom absolute and manuka wax alongside cardamom, frankincense and roasted rockrose. For the custom bottle, they coated Bodha’s sculptural metal cap in Activist’s signature vermilion. The color evokes a burnt orange rising sun — a symbol, Mirkin says, of new beginnings. $150, activistmanuka.com, bodha.com.
— Laura Regensdorf
Go Here
In Mérida, Mexico, a Minimalist Hotel Opens in a Restored Mansion
Mérida, the capital of Yucatán on the Mexican peninsula of the same name, draws visitors with its mix of colonial architecture and expanding art scene, as well as its proximity to important Mayan ruins such as Uxmal and Chichén Itzá. Hotel Sevilla, a 21-room property scheduled to open Nov. 13 near the city’s main square, channels the city’s blend of bygone majesty and contemporary vibrancy. Built in the 16th century, the stately casona, or grand aristocratic house, became a hotel in the 20th century but had sat abandoned since the 1980s. Grupo Habita, the Mexican hospitality company behind the renovation, kept its name, though they worked with the Mexican German architecture firm Zeller & Moye to temper the building’s monumental scale with modern shapes, including a striking spiral staircase in raw concrete. Almond trees provide shade in a formal courtyard beyond a lime-washed lobby, while newly uncovered 18th-century frescoes were preserved in the cloistered corridors around it. The minimalist rooms (some over 700 square feet) pair antique window frames and soaring wood-beamed ceilings with black tile floors that have a cooling effect and local artisanal touches like pistachio-lacquered cedar furniture and lampshades made from henequen, an agave-derived rope fiber. But the lushest comforts are in the social areas: A sinkhole-inspired cold plunge offers refuge from the city’s tropical steaminess, and in a second patio (the former stables), a pool is bisected by an old wall with a cutout that guests can swim through. For fuel between lounging sessions, a cantina and a bistro spanning the patios and porticos offer French-Mexican fare and drinks that nod to Mayan culture, such as a Yucatán Carajillo containing tequila, espresso and Xtabentún, a regional anise liqueur. From $195 a night, hotelsevilla-merida.com.
— Suleman Anaya
Gift This
A Jewelry Designer’s First Foray Into Home Goods
The Hudson, N.Y.-based designer Presley Oldham started his jewelry line in 2020 with a focus on craftsmanship, making most of the pearl and glass pieces by hand at his upstate studio. Now, to mark his brand’s five-year anniversary, he’s expanding into housewares. The five-piece collection includes a set of glass nesting trays and a sterling silver worry stone, which was inspired by a rock that sat on Oldham’s grandmother’s desk. A candle in a handblown blue and green glass vessel is named Sprout, representing “a new beginning, a burst of life,” says Oldham. He collaborated with Ben Lewellyn of Village Common to create a warm, earthy fragrance with notes of oud, cedar and clary sage. The candle’s container can be used as a cup or catchall once the wax has burned down. “I try to build versatility into my jewelry — a necklace that can double as a belt or wrap bracelet,” says Oldham. “I brought that perspective to the home collection as well.” From $42, presleyoldham.com.
— Gage Daughdrill
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