Home With You

The smell of being looked after.

The first thing developed for the house, and it is built out of a sick day. A cherry cough drop arrives in a quick burst and is gone before it settles. A band-aid accord takes its place, plasticky, sweet, medicine as a smell and not as a cure.

Opoponax rounds out the musk beneath that, rich and resinous, sweet myrrh under its other name, balsamic and sweet as it goes. Earthy orris and animalic white florals hold the band-aid accord up, and the florals refuse to go pretty. Carrot seed keeps the ground beneath them. Grounding, intimate, and someone loved resting in the room.

Escapist advertising promises far-flung places, and Domestica has no argument with the fun of that. In lieu of it, this house treats a bottle as a vessel for taking the domestic world along, and builds its fragrances out of ordinary rooms and back gardens. The artist and writer Jenny Odell suggests escaping laterally, towards each other, and that is the escape on offer here.

Marty Schissler and Alvaro Lozano co-founded the project, which is formulated, designed and packaged in Chicago. Schissler is self-taught and makes the fragrances; Lozano is a visual artist and shapes the material world of Domestica. The name was Björk's working title for Vespertine, and the debut collection is named for confabulation, the memory error in which a brain honestly fills its own blanks. Honest lying, and the trio explores letting smell do it.