First up, two videos (one is below the jump) about Frédéric Malle’s new boutique in the Marais district of Paris. The boutique was designed by the architecture firm of Jakob + MacFarlane (and there is an article with lots of pictures at designboom).
Below those, first, a video telling the story behind the brand. Below that, perfumer Michel Roudnitska talks about Le Parfum de Thérèse, created by his father, Edmond Roudnitska.
An ambassador for French luxury houses and the French art of living, fragrance is one of the crowning jewels in the French economy. Yet, despite its international influence, French perfumery has not previously been on display in Paris; there has never been an emblematic space worthy of its true measure.
— Le Grand Musée du Parfum, supported by Syndicat français de la parfumerie, with an exhibit designed by International Flavors & Fragrances, opens in December, in a house formerly owned by the Christian Lacroix fashion brand. Read more at Le Grand Musee du Parfum – A new museum dedicated to perfumery will open in Paris at 2Luxury2.
Many of us have a fantasy place where the world is a cut above our everyday lives. Maybe we’ve only read about this place or seen it in movies. Maybe it doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s as if we need somewhere to dream about when life turns out not to be what we’d hoped. For a lot of people, that place is Paris.
My niece, who until recently had never been east of Billings, Montana, used to be obsessed with Paris. She’d even considered getting a tattoo of a bluebird pulling a banner reading “la vie est belle” around the Eiffel Tower.1 In Paris — the dream Paris, that is — every café serves homemade cassoulet, women are chic (and thin) and buy their groceries at a farmers market, windows have pink geraniums and views of the Eiffel Tower (or of roofs and chimney pots), and romance lurks on every metro ride…
Here is an assortment of smells, with a few other senses tossed in:
To me, the waft from a fromagerie is heaven, but some people might label its moist, pungent mold and aged milk smell as hell. Keeping cheese is an art the French call “affinage,” and a good cheese store has a basement with each cheese inspected regularly to see if it needs turned or painted or moved to a drier or wetter shelf. Fostering cheese is a real art, and a smelly one that no amount of Glade plug-ins could overcome. Not that you’d want them to.
Where I’m staying, church bells sound the quarter hour from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. with a brisk one-two clang for every fifteen minutes past the hour. I love these bells…
Buildings have their own smell. Have you ever noticed it? With the change of weather, buildings exhale their age, materials, and history.
First, homes definitely hold their owners’ scents. You could lead me blindfolded into a home, and I’d tell you in a second if the occupant was a vegetarian or had pets. (Honestly, vegetarians smell a little mustier than meat eaters.) I have a housesitter, a terrific guy, and when I handed over my keys, I wondered if he’d feel comfortable in my home surrounded by my odor: two cats, flowers on the mantel, old furniture, a ripe cantaloupe in the refrigerator. I changed the sheets and gave the mattress a few spritzes of Santa Maria Novella cologne…