Discovery Set

A day borrowed from reality.

The 32nd of July is where the house puts everything it makes: five releases, in order, across one summer day. Botanicals build all of them, and what comes out of that includes wet stone, a cocktail cherry and the inside of a room at closing time. It is the house's notebook.

Water and cold air open at first light. By midday the heat has set off the longing for somewhere far away. The afternoon garden has already been watered. After dark a Hamburg district turns red, and one minute short of midnight a room is still holding its evening. Five separate places, and the hours between them do the joining.

32.JULI was founded in Hamburg by sisters Juli Pätzold and Maria Magdalena Stachowiak, who hold two degrees in olfactory design between them and more than a decade of work behind them. The name belongs to the 32nd of July, a day that exists on no calendar. An architect and a designer by training, the two of them shape the object as closely as they shape the liquid.

Everything is made from plant-based materials alone. Essential oils, botanical extracts, resins, hydrolates and natural isolates are the whole vocabulary, and those materials are pushed a long way from their origins: latex, sun lotion, wet stone, crème brûlée. Each bottle is finished with a ceramic cap the house designed and makes individually by hand, so the marks left by its making stay visible on the object.