Everything Good Happens By Candlelight

Luxury hotels have always understood the part candles play in creating the perfect ambience. The Baccarat Hotel New York, master of light and glass, offers bespoke, multi-sensory in-suite packages like their “Take Your Love to New Heights” experience, in which the hotel illuminates a suite with dozens of flickering candles, their light reflecting off custom Baccarat crystal chandeliers, as a private chef serves elite aphrodisiac pairings. Many of the Banyan Tree Hotels & Resorts host in-villa scent rituals whereby staff set up an oil burner, with aromatic incense and candle pairings. Honeymoon havens like Conrad Maldives are also experts at romantic candlelit beach dinners, offering bountiful feasts of Maldivian lobsters and shellfish, free-flowing house champagne, all under the terracotta skies at dusk, surrounded by variously sized glass lanterns and lit torches.

Recreate the mood: The key here is the interplay between the senses, with the enticing sight of candlelight mingling with appeals to scent and taste. To go with your oyster ceviche, consider a Brunello Cuccinelli sphere diffuser, one of the many gorgeous Loewe Perfumes home fragrances or perhaps burn a few sticks of L’Objet x Haas Brothers incense collaboration, to delight the nose as well.

The world’s most exclusive wellness studios are also harnessing the healing potential of the glow. In Surrenne Belgravia at The Emory in London you can indulge in a night swim by candlelight, while Ragdale Hall Spa in the English countryside has a candlelit cave pool.

Recreate the mood: Emulating these experiences is easy. All you need is a Diptyque trio on the side of your bath, as you carve out a little time for self-care.

Some of this season’s most memorable dinners have leaned into the mood. At our recent NET-A-PORTER x Khaite celebration in Florence, Olivia Wilde, Gemma Chan and other invited guests enjoyed a dinner in the Roman Garden, in the grounds of Villa San Michele, at a table under an ethereal, low-light installation, which changed its glow with each course. “Outdoor entertaining has become much more sensorial,” says Dowling, “it is about how a guest feels sitting there as the light changes, candles begin to glow, music carrying through the landscape. Perfectly spaced candles can often feel far more luxurious than anything overly layered or elaborate.”

Recreate the mood: We can think of nothing more stylish than a dinner table runner lined with Loewe Perfumes’ all-wax sculptural tapered candles. One in every color for the maximalists among us.

Candlelight’s greatest trick is probably that it makes people lean in a little more to look at each other, the proximity softening social barriers. It encourages the kind of cloistered closeness that brings even strangers together, not to mention what it inspires among lovers. A candle’s power is divine, in that sense. Which is why, while historically hallowed, they are every year becoming more synonymous with elevated objets d’art.

Recreate the mood: Sculptural beeswax tapers, giant scalloped bowls with triple wicks, glazed terracotta earthenware, hand-thrown ceramic sticks, blown-glass hurricanes and polished candelabras live pride of place on coffee tables, with owners debating daily whether they’re too beautiful to burn. Rare objects that can transform a room visually as well as the experience of being inside it.