When Meredith and David met in graduate school, they both liked scent but weren’t fiends for it: Meredith wore mostly Chanel Coco, and David stuck to essential oils. It wasn’t until they moved in together that they really began exploring perfume. Over the fifteen years or so since, Meredith and David have built a modest but thoughtful collection of shared and separate fragrances.

First, a little background. Meredith, an artist, grew up in Anaconda, Montana, in a rambling Victorian house. Her family wasn’t big on perfume, although she remembers her mother occasionally wearing something that smelled like lilies of the valley. When Meredith was a teenager, she bought a bottle of Coco, which became the foundation of the few bottles of perfume she kept on hand and set the stage for her love of orientals. As she was finding her perfume legs, she wore Jessica McClintock and Issey Miyake Eau d’Issey, too.

David, also an artist and management at a big Portland design firm, grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, in a fragrance-loving Italian-American family…

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