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 tmagazine@nytimes.com.
Go Here
Villa d’Este Opens a Modern Offshoot
As teenagers, the sisters Nathalie and Virginie Droulers would spend their winter vacations helping their mother redecorate and refurbish the rooms at Villa d’Este, their family’s 16th-century hotel on the western shore of Lake Como, in Italy. More recently, nearly 20 years after their father sold the property in 2007, the sisters — who now run the Milanese design firm Droulers Architecture — have returned to design the Miralago Luxury Apartments, eight one- and two-bedroom suites that are opening as an offshoot of Villa d’Este in the town of Cernobbio. They used a palette of cream, soft blues and natural wood to reflect the local scenery, with white Calacatta marble bathrooms, textiles from the Como-based fabric brand Dedar and vintage furniture sourced from markets around Italy. Each suite provides the amenities of an apartment — including private kitchens and a laundry room — coupled with the services of Villa d’Este, such as in-room breakfasts, on-call private chefs and a 1950s mahogany motorboat, recently refurbished to ferry guests around the lake. The ground floor of the building, which is in Cernobbio’s lakeside central piazza, will also function as a cafe where guests and the public can have breakfast, drink a coffee and people watch. Miralago Luxury Apartments will open on June 28, from about $2,890 a night, miralagoluxuryapartments.com.
— Laura May Todd
Covet This
Textured Ceramics Made With Wood Fire
The New Jersey-based ceramic artist Sydney Hyunah Oh’s practice is a largely solitary endeavor, save for the twice-yearly treks she makes to a Japanese-style wood-fire kiln run by the artist Tony Moore in Cold Spring, N.Y. The physically demanding, days-long communal process involves building and stoking a fire around the clock, then loading the kiln with ceramics, sealing it off and letting chance take its course. “I can use the same clay, the same glaze, but I can’t repeat myself,” Oh says. Variances in smoke, ash, carbon capture and other atmospheric conditions ensure that no finished pieces come out alike; each takes on unique crackling, shine and speckled textures, as well as hues that can range from blue-green to rust, lavender and deep red. In her decade of experience with the method, Oh has also researched the history of skilled Joseon-era Korean potters who were forcibly relocated to Japan during the 16th-century Imjin Wars (also known as the Ceramic Wars) and influenced the rapid development of ceramic technology and artistry there. “For me, wood firing is a cultural reclamation,” she says. After recent showings of her work at Alcova Miami and Collectible New York last year, this month Oh is launching a new set of stoneware and porcelain vessels made by hand and formed by flame. From $250, email sydney@sydneyoh.com to inquire, sydneyoh.com.
— Aileen Kwun
The Brooklyn-based artist Keisha Scarville was in her 20s when her father handed over a stack of photographs, including his first passport portrait as a teenager in Guyana. “I’ve become the de facto archivist for my family,” says Scarville, who for years kept the black-and-white photo in a frame on her dresser. In 2012, she decided to make copies, beginning what has evolved into a monumental project on a palm-size scale. She’s created hundreds of variations on the image, incorporating collage, handwritten text, pools of glitter and even a wishbone. An ostensibly banal form of documentation has proved to be “this really explosive platform to have so many conversations,” says the artist. A cutout of James Brown, whose 1968 song “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud” debuted the summer after her father immigrated to the United States, reflects his longtime love of music as well as the shift in racial consciousness at the time. In another portrait, a flash of overlaid red lipstick connects him to the daughter who shares his likeness. After a New York exhibition last year presented some 300 of the works on the gallery walls, the book “Passports,” out this week from Mack, offers additional context for the series. Scarville has included larger-format collages (one layers her photograph of the Guyanese landscape with her father’s 1980s self-portrait) and excerpts from their dialogue. “I liked everything about America, but I didn’t know a lot,” he says of his first impressions — in part because the books and magazines back home only focused on glamorous lives. “They didn’t tell us about the average person.” $70, mackbooks.us.
— Laura Regensdorf
The tailors Thom Widdett and Luke Sweeney met while working on London’s Savile Row, which has been a global center for bespoke tailoring since the mid-19th century. The pair founded their own label, Thom Sweeney, in 2007, offering ready-to-wear clothes such as traditional suiting staples and more casual pieces like knit polo shirts, as well as bespoke and made-to-measure services. (For the uninitiated, there is a difference: “bespoke” denotes the creation of an entirely new pattern based on its wearer’s measurements and requires multiple fittings, whereas a made-to-measure garment or suit is based on an existing pattern, which is adjusted to its wearer’s specifications.) Now, after opening stores in London, Miami, Los Angeles and New York’s SoHo neighborhood, Thom Sweeney is venturing uptown, where it will be the only Savile Row tailoring house with a presence on Madison Avenue. In addition to the store’s retail and atelier spaces, the new location will open with Sol’s, an in-store bar and lounge named in honor of Luke Sweeney’s father-in-law. To set up shop, the brand’s head cutter, Max Whitaker, will live in New York for the next year, where he’ll work on-site at the Madison flagship, hand-cutting patterns and fitting clients. For him, the process is deeply personal. “I approach it as a conversation before anything else,” he says. “It’s important to understand what the suit is for, but more important is how it will be lived in, how someone moves, how they carry themselves and how they want to feel when they put it on.” Thom Sweeney’s Madison Avenue location will open on June 11, thomsweeney.com.
— Jameson Montgomery
Stay Here
In Nara, Japan, a Meiji-Era Prison Is Transformed Into a Hotel
The Nara Prison was built in 1908 by Japan’s Meiji government as proof that the modernizing nation was ready to join the Western world. Five such prisons — all grand, made from red brick and radially planned on the Haviland system, in which cell wings fan out from a central guard post — were completed across the country. But Nara’s, about 30 minutes south of Kyoto, is the only one that remains intact. It was a juvenile detention facility before being designated a National Important Cultural Property in 2017. This month, it becomes Hoshinoya Nara Prison, a 48-room hotel that’s largely the work of the Tokyo-based architect Rie Azuma, who threaded modern comforts through a structure that cannot, by law, be significantly altered. Individual cells (each less than 66 square feet) were joined to make suites, and the original plaster was stripped to expose hand-laid brickwork beneath. Hoshinoya, a luxury brand with nine properties around Asia, isn’t shying from the location’s history. “We don’t only see it as a symbol of confinement and punishment but also a place to learn, to reflect and to become the better version of oneself,” says Masaya Kakegawa, the hotel’s general manager. The aim is to give guests an experience that, he says, goes beyond “standardized materialistic luxury.” The restaurant’s menu traces the history of Western-style cuisine in Japan with dishes such as braised sole served with creamy Albert sauce (an English invention), while a connected museum explores the idea of incarceration through a permanent collection and rotating exhibits. Hoshinoya Nara Prison opens on June 25, from $1,300 a night, hoshinoresorts.com.
— John Wogan
The Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo is often invited to put on large exhibitions in major cities: In February, he opened a solo show at Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. But his newest works — delicate microinstallations of living flowers and fish bones encased in glass vessels, as well as bronze sculptures that appear to sprout mushrooms — are on display in a less expected venue: a gallery in a former auto-repair shop that’s part of an arts complex on the Danish island of Møn, about 75 miles from Copenhagen. 44Møen, as the space is called, was founded in 2008 by the German curator René Block and his wife, the curator Ursula Block, as well as several Møn-based artists such as Ursula Reuter Christiansen, Vo’s former professor at Royal Academy Copenhagen. The gallery focuses on experimental work that often includes sound art and happenings. For Vo’s show, which the artist sees as a commentary on migration and cultural exchange, there will be a pho pop-up, often overseen by Vo’s nephew Gustav, as well as meditation classes led by Vo’s brother Nguyen. “All That Prevents You From Leaving, All That Is Your Enemy” will be on view through Sept. 20, 44moen.dk.
— Gisela Williams
From T’s Instagram
