If you could design the perfect perfume boutique, what would it look like? Would you want a private smelling booth? A fainting couch? How about a bar so you could have a drink or an espresso while you wait for the dry down? Would it be all white minimalism like LA’s The Scent Bar? A black-and-gold wrapped present of a room like Ormonde Jayne’s London store? A crowded jewel box with red walls and a chandelier, like New York’s Aedes de Venustas? Or something else altogether?
Last fall, Professor Lois Weinthal invited me to lecture on perfume to her interior design seminar at the University of Texas School of Architecture. The students would spend the semester designing an ideal perfume boutique with me as their “client.” But there was a twist: their other client would be Professor Jeffrey Siegel, an engineer who studies indoor air pollution. The students would have to satisfy both of us.
On my first class visit I introduced the students to the basics of perfume, including an overview of its history and how it reacts to the warmth of one’s body and expands in the air. The biggest challenge in selling perfume, I suggested, is that the product requires time to unfold and to understand. How might the interior of a boutique encourage the customer to stick around long enough to really fall for something? How could they create a space that allowed for privacy and concentration while still making it easy for sales assistants to help out?
Then, under the guise of introducing them to a few typical perfume genres (citrus, white flowers, oriental and so on) I passed around scent strips, spritzed a few wrists and did my shameless best to convert them to my cause. A good time was had by all, but the seminar room was very small and poorly ventilated and by the end of the session my sinuses and I had to admit there was far too much perfume in the air.
Before I returned, the students went to visit Professor Siegel’s lab. Since it’s often impossible to change the ventilation systems in retail environments (the spaces are rented, or too expensive to retro-fit) he introduced the students to several passive methods of capturing harmful compounds in the air, including activated charcoal (basically, your Brita filter turned into a loofah-like mat), clay paint (a paint made from unfired clay), a specially formulated cement, and a material that can be substituted for the panels in a typical dropped ceiling.
When I spoke to him later, Professor Siegel told me that while any of these methods would cut down on the amount of perfume in the air, it was equally important that they would eliminate ozone, because some chemicals commonly found in both synthetic and natural aromatic materials react with ozone to form harmful compounds. (Ideally, we would all wear personal ozone-eliminators, perhaps in the form of a specially treated fabric.) Professor Siegel also mentioned that some studies have hypothesized that chronic over-sprayers who consume huge amounts of perfume may be addicted not to perfume itself, but to these ozone-created compounds. He also noted that ozone can change the scent of a perfume — if you’ve ever wondered why your perfume smells different on a city street in summer than it does out in the country, ozone might be part of the answer.
In their initial plans, the students were able to address some of my concerns with seating and floor layout — one even included a special room for brides and grooms — while integrating Professor Siegel’s air purifying materials into their boutiques in many creative ways. My favorites included a decorative felt wall (felt is also a good material for soaking up scent) and long tabletops (intended as space for testing and discussing perfume) whose surfaces included graceful swathes of activated carbon mat. A few students also took advantage of Austin’s weather to create a garden space where clients could relax while their perfume unfolded — an idea that made me dream of a perfume boutique with a reference garden — jasmine, vetiver, bergamot, neroli trees…
Though Professor Weinthal originally assumed that Professor Siegel and I would be at Siskel-and-Ebert odds in our goals, in fact we were closely aligned. I loved the idea of being able to test perfume without a confusing cloud of ambient scent and I like breathing clean air as much as the next person. Some of my favorite perfume lines have tackled these issues, witness the perfumed ceramic rods employed by the Chanel perfume boutique in Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, and the Superman phone booth-sized testing spaces employed by Frederic Malle where the perfumed air is sucked out after each test.
In fact, the real Siskel to my Ebert was the dominant aesthetic — or what the students assumed was the dominant aesthetic, the “right thing to do” — of the School of Architecture and beyond. My fantasy perfume boutique does not look like the polished concrete and brushed steel spaces that house everything from hip restaurants to hair salons these days. When it comes to perfume, I am a romantic. I love that perfume is a gorgeous something extra. I love its strangeness and its secret stories. I don’t want to shop in something that looks like a laboratory (sorry Le Labo). I prefer the design cues of a boudoir, an alchemist’s cave, a ruined church, or even a surreal dinner party. I’d much rather err on the side of excess than be trapped in the severities of good taste.
So after the mid-semester review, I returned to Professor Weinthal’s classroom and began my talk by blowing perfumer Francis Kurkdjian’s violet-scented bubbles around the room until everyone was giggling. Then we talked not just about design, and possible options, but about softness, pleasure and what it meant to buy yourself something that was a treat. And we talked about what it meant, as a student, to take risks, to hold on to playfulness in the face of being graded and critiqued.
In the end, the students were hampered by deadlines and the difficulties of mastering the program they used to create their representations. Still, the final results showed touches of humor (one boutique was decorated with gigantic line renderings of noses) and sensuality (low stools in quilted white leather, a curving wooden wall with the perfumes in spotlighted inset niches that created a series of intimate spaces).
But what seemed more important to me was that both the students and the committee of professors who conducted their final critique seemed liberated from the usual run of things by perfume. “This is a perfume boutique. It’s an opportunity to do something, well, a little sexy,” said one professor. “Sometimes — most of the time,” said another, “you have to go too far and get it wrong before you really know what you need.”
It’s a kind of freedom and provocation that seems worth hanging on to, even if we sometimes have to work a little harder to clear the air.
Note: image is Interior of a Harem by Leon-Auguste-Adolphe Belly via all-history.org.
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Interesting and really fun article.
Thank you!
I agree–this was a REALLY fun article to read, and the design assignment sounds fascinating. Does there have to be a budget? Seems to me you could design all sorts of space-age scent-sucking devices and uber-private niches, but whether your boutique would turn a profit might be another story.
As for me, I actually love the minimalist, neo-classical style, although I know what you mean about uber-modernist, downright sterile places. I like high ceilings, wooden flooring, and sparse but sumptuous furniture.
The details the perfect perfume boutique would have are:
–Lots of interesting niche lines, arranged by house. Each fragrance should have its own shelf, so you’re not picking things up off a table at random and hopping you finally select the one you wanted. Everything should have a tester.
–Lots of knowledgeable SAs should be available, with spare samples of everything on hand. This, to me, is more important than getting people to stick around and wait for scents to unfold. I prefer to take a scent home with me and spend the day with it.
–Every scent should be labeled with its name, a phonetic pronunciation guide, and its listed notes.
–I also like your preference for having single notes for reference. Instead of a garden, since I don’t particularly like floral or green notes myself, I would simply have a wall of single note perfume oils for reference.
I love this vision! Am totally imagining one of those fashion-shoot warehouse type spaces now, with sumptuous furniture and silk curtains. And totally agree about samples and how the perfume should be arranged in terms of my own shopping experience, but I’ve also, many times, taken a sample and then purchased elsewhere, so…
What a lovely article, Alyssa- loved reading it..
I love the picture that you’ve included..I think diwans (like that cot in your picture) in a perfume boutique would be wonderful. I do like the Scent Bar- but it is difficult to sample when there are too many people- though then there is always the added pleasure of interacting with other perfume lovers..
In my imaginary ideal perfume boutique- there maybe three or four ‘smelling’ corners/spots – surrounded by floor cushions or diwans- organized by perfume notes, maybe?..A couple of bookshelves, so you can read while the perfume unfolds. A hammock near a window overlooking a garden..One can dream right? *daydreams*
Oooh, I want to go to your boutique, too! So much fun to hear other visions. One of the student’s did have a kind of “love pit” at one point–a sunken couch space, very glam ’70′s, but I think she edited it out of her final submission.
Love pit! LOL!
I’m in the (very early) beginning phases of buying my first home, and I am finding that I’m really interested in mid-century ranches that have period accents! So I bought an interior design book at Goodwill printed in 1974, and I can EXACTLY see your “love pit!” Not sure how I’d feel about one of those in a public place, but to have a central gathering space like that in a home seems nice to me!
I was just glad she took a risk. And we had fun talking about it in class!
I meant ‘there would be’ (aargh typos)
Totally read it that way. My eye just skips over typos online (including my own, unfortunately).
Great article, Alyssa!
Thank you, Dixie!
Love this article, such an interesting experiment…
I would have a boutique quite similar to Aedes de Venustas but with more places to sit, sectioned off privately by ornate screens! Each little couch / table area is sort of it own style, they are not uniform, but go together well. Basically like Aedes meets the Carlyle Tea room. Little low tables where you or a SA can pull testers (yes, agree with whoever said a tester for everything is essential) off the shelves and sit in comfy low chairs and each table has an assortment of scent strips, tissue, a little tin of coffee beans if your into that sort of thing…
And it wouldn’t be bad if they had a tea menu as well, so you could either come in and grab something and go, or as we say spend the afternoon there with tea and finger sandwiches if you have afternoons to spend mulling over fragrances.
Strangely enough, my BF had a friend who owned a place exactly like this when they were in college, but alas it closed! A Perfume and Tea place in San Francisco / Berkley, anyone know of it?
This sounds wonderful. I do wonder if the tea+perfume would confuse one another. But perhaps if we had enough activated carbon around it wouldn’t be a problem…
Oooh, that sounds lovely!
Such an arrangement would require some very talented SA’s! I would fear feeling trapped by someone in one of those little nooks who just didn’t get my preferences. Is/was there an etiquette about getting up and moving to a new one?
Haha I say the SAs float around to the different tables similar to a sommelier, staying to bring different offerings or offer advice or info on whatever your interested in, or floating off to help someone else or just float around on the wings I’ve decided she has apparently … Wow that is sounding perfect… It is located in heaven!
The absolutely typical way of keeping customers in-store is to instal a cafe. Bookshops have been doing this for years. Was that a potential part of the brief your students were respondign to? Because of course that introduces a whole bunch of new smells – and not just coffee – to the space.
[As an aside, I was in an antique shop a while ago with my two children, aged 8 and 12, and it had a cafe. We thought we would get a snack there, but were told that they do not allow children in the cafe because it encourages them to run around, smear food, and berak stuff. Of course I swept out in high dander, and the kids thought I was MAGNIFICENT - but honestly! I ask you ... Still, it's an interestinmg example of th risks you take in incorporating to potentially conflicting functions into the one space.]
That strikes me as a very antique shop sort of response–there’s a cafe but children can’t eat there, just like there are all those chairs that can’t be sat upon and so on. Kind of funny, actually.
We talked about the possibility of food in the outdoor space, but mostly we focused on beverages. I told them about how Patou kept a bar in his atelier, the better to entertain and loosen up the gentlemen paying for their ladies clothes…
Oh a bar in a perfumery would be perfect. I would never leave.
A bar sounds like an excellent perfume-appropriate alternative to the large TVs near department store women’s dressing rooms! Research shows that women buy more clothes if their fella gives the garment their approval, and I suspect that fragrance would be the same way.
Yes!
Maybe they would have let your kids stay if you had them collared and leashed..
As long as I buy the collars and leashes there, as antiques!
Your fantasy boutique sounds like the Serge Lutens store in the Palais Royal. It even overlooks a garden, and the SAs encourage you to walk around and let the perfume develop after they place a sample on your wrist.
In case you’ve never been there, here’s a video: http://www.vimeo.com/1889326
Ah! Thank you, Rick! I hope to visit someday. It is becoming more and more ridiculous that I have never been to Paris.
Simply wonderful.. a garden to walk around! And SAs who wouldn’t expect you to buy after the first sniff…
My dream perfumerie would be incorporated into a day spa. A very lavish day spa. It would offer massages and other body treatments, none of which would be scented. That way, I could be sniffing my wrists as my selections unfolded, while my back is pummeled and my fingers and tootsies are rubbed and polished.
That is a great idea! I would love to visit a spa like that and it is easier to part with your money when you are relaxed
Agreed!
Thank you for the very interesting article. I especially enjoyed how you made the experience visceral for the students, challenging them beyond the visual and technical.
Thank you, Ruth. I thought it was important for the students to understand what a pleasure perfume can be. I did inspire a few of them to dig out old bottles which thrilled me.
Alyssa, my congratulations on getting architects to see outside the ‘modern’ box! As a landscape architect I work with many architects. To the profession modern is ‘cool’ but unfortunately it is too often cold and too sterile to be a positive environment for humans. I’m so glad you had a chance to talk to these young adults before their tastes are fully developed, and opened their eyes to softer, nourishing spaces. Your article made my night!
Thank you! Although I should note that the professors who did the final crit turned out to be less strict in their aesthetic than the students originally gave them credit for. I brought my bubbles along to that session too, just in case, and they came in handy as a way to explain what I was looking for. One of the previously stern modernists actually gave a mini-speech about delight and design!
p.s. To any architects out there, I love modern occasionally, too! Not dissing the profession.
There’s a time and place for everything!
Me too. I just object to tyrannies of any kind, on principle. And I suspect this one is gendered to me–clean, strong (!) lines backed up by a lot of heavy duty theory vs. plush, rounded, feminine spaces that no one has bothered to theorize save in a negative way. I’m sure the reality is more nuanced, though. I’m just an outsider/fan!
Very interesting! Indoor air pollution is a serious issue – and just imagine the lungs of the SAs who breathe overperfumed air all day – so the pairing of you and Dr. Siegal was brilliant!
Some of us were joking around on one of the weekend polls about a perfumista pub – all the basic pub elements plus a set Caron urns, everyone swapping samples and decants, etc. That would be fun!
Love that idea!
And yes, I learned so much about indoor air pollution doing this project. Professor Siegel told me that things are often much worse indoors than out, but there seems to be a psychological/political barrier against reacting accordingly. We still think we can shut the world out when we close the door.
Seems to me that part of the ventilation problem could be solved by moving into a space that had previously been occupied by a salon. Some of the chemicals that profesional hair stylists work with are absolutely vicious, and they have to have quite extensive (and yes, expensive) ventilation systems installed in thier spaces. After that, the rest of designing the space should be a piece of cake! I agree…a tea bar is a must (but no coffee, for mine) as well as a garden with a little outdoor/screened & glassed-in porch bakery/cafe (I’m in Iowa, screens aren’t great for winter!) and nice comfy furniture upholstered in leather, nothing too plush. Cork floors for me, and real wood counters, sort of approaching a rococo aesthetic, but just a little shy of it. A corner with books, some to sell, sure, but mostly to sit and enjoy while you wait on your perfume to develop. Around the walls the perfumes would be arranged not by like, although everything would have to be clearly marked, but by scent type and ease of wear, from “beginner” to “whoa!” I would prefer my SAs to be mainly older ladies and gents, each with a younger assistant/trainee, and yes…non-aggression is best. Who wants to be pushed into buying something that’s supposed to be fun? Testers and samples available for everything, and decant and splitting services. What would be nicer than being able to pool your cash with a group of firends and just go get the split done right there, right? Oh, subdued but not dim lighting. Most places go too far one way or the other with the lights, and it’s not pleasant. Cool inside all year round, not cold, just cool. Um…we’d have a wall for scented products for the home, and perfumery ephemera like art books, bottle displays, coffret cases, art glass bottles and such…and a little shop in the front for perfumed candies, of which there are more than I once would have believed.
Can’t think of anything else at the moment, but I’ve no doubt more and more will occur to me throughout the day?
And no, I’d probably never turn a profit either.
Argh. “Not by like” should be “not by line.”
I blame the lack of coffee, since it’s too freakin’ hot to drink any right now.
Interesting idea, about the salon! I wonder what the codes are like for them. Certainly I’ve been in many a nail salon with very poor ventilation.
Love all the rest of your ideas, too–and absolutely no worries about typos, I read right past them.
Here, they’ve recently gotten stricter, I don’t know how strict exactly, and figure that some of the longer-established places may have been getting either grandfathered in, or conveniently ignored, but in a lot of cases, where they are able to, the stylists and owners are demanding/doing it themselves. Particularly after the news about the Brazilian Blowout (which never seems to have even made it here) and projects like Chris Rock’s documentary Good Hair. It is still uneven, though. Nail salons specifically I don’t know about, but I’d hope they’d have to have as good or better ventilation than hair salons, those places are horrific what with all the noxious odors they produce.
In many commercial build outs, it is either necessary to build a ventilation system, or possible to add one. (every restaurant design, for instance, must have one tailored for its kitchen). Unfortunately, in most designs, for all type of projects, this is the part of the design left to the last minute, or the most prone to budget cuts, even though a good HVAC is essential to enjoying and using the building.
*chough* And insuring it adequately!
Interesting. Thanks for the info, Dilana!
Love the idea of splitting service available! Better yet what if it was like the Perfumed Court, but a shop! “I’ll have 20 ml of Chergui, 5 ml of the vintage Tabac Blond ’73, and a handful of samples”. OMG I would just die! And of course they would have to have really pretty glass bottles and atomizers in all the sizes of their own design, so you still got that ‘new pretty bottle’ purchase feeling! Someone must do this!
So the scientist in me is very interested to learn more about ozone and perfume and potential addictive qualities? It also makes me wonder if this is one of the mysterious influences to why a scent wears differently on different days, not just different spaces as you mentioned. I’d be interested in a link to more info, if you have it!
Thanks, by the way, a really great article and I so wish I could have been in on the many classes/meetings/discussions along the way!
Marjorie, I will ask Jeff about links, but I suspect you’d have to read the journal articles themselves. He told me one of his challenges in working with the students is that all the work he’s doing is so new and relatively speculative that there aren’t any websites or texts to point the student’s toward for background info.
What a fantastic article and definitely food for thought!
Thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed it!
Wow, wish I was in that course!
I think some of the reason beauty and perfume shops go for modernist/minimalist look is that this also gives a science-ish look to the whole enterprise, and makes the customer more trusting of the supposed authorities at work there.
I think you are right, and it draws from the apothecary tradition of perfume, too. But I like the other branches better.
Great article and what a fascinating project to work on! Makes me wish I were a student again (uh, sort of, lol!). I’ve always wondered why fragrance departments and shops don’t have their own oxygen bars. These were the latest fad when I lived in Seattle in the mid-to-late 90s and I always thought this would be a practical kind of use for those things when you’re trying multiple fragrances. Just a thought.
A very interesting idea! But I wonder if it would make some customers panicky, the idea that they had to be revived that way!
Lmao! Didn’t even cross my mind. Ah, I am so not the typical consumer.
While I prefer to live in ultra-modern surroundings, a perfume boutique should be romantic, not lab-like. We need to dream…
Roja Dove’s boutique in Harrods is sumptuous and plush. I think chandeliers are de rigeur in a perfume boutique. It should be just this side of kitschy. An ingredient-themed garden would be wonderful. Sections with testers of just one fragrance family are a great idea. KateReed above said it all best for me. Thank you for mentioning that staff should be of mature age. Music hasn’t been brought up but I suppose there’s no escaping it in today’s society. I would hope it would be soft new-agey or centuries-old classics.
Glad you liked my idea. I was thinking (I told you all this would stick with me all day!) and thinking of what would be nice to hear in such a place and found myself rejecting and approving the different pieces playing on the public radio station. Yes…I’ve been building playlists, in my head, for a shop that I’ll never have!
I have no order to my thoughts today. It just occured to me that one of our department stores has a baby grand and a live pianist (as well as cages of canaries, for some reason) in store all the time…wouldn’t something like that (minus the canaries, probably) be fun?
Well Aedes has little dogs and stuffed peacocks. Don’t see why canaries wouldn’t work!
In your dream, you can have a sound-free boutique! Love the idea of chandeliers being “de rigueur.”
Vancouver’s Perfume Shoppe has Nazrin, the secret ingredient for an ideal perfume store. She has a look at someone, asks a couple of questions, and then pulls out neat selections people wouldn’t have necessarily thought of for themselves. I keep bringing friends in, ‘cos I like the process so much…
Yes, the people are always the most important thing!
Really enjoyed this post Alyssa. Thanks for sharing-what a fun opportunity to share some of this passion with a group of young ins- I imagine you learned as much as you imparted to them
It gave me hope for the perfumed future, I’ll tell you that much! I went in thinking they would only like light, sweet and clean, but in fact they were as diverse in their tastes as any of us, and just nearly as adventurous. And UT has a fairly conservative student body.
Very interesting article. I am too more fan of a boudoir like spaces when it comes to perfumes. It makes me feel cosy.
Exactly.
Oh gosh! I work at UT! If you ever repeat this experiment, send me an invite! haha.