Leather Rosa

Flowers that end up tanned.

Damask roses go down on a bed of smoky oudh and amber. Raspberry bruises the first of it with a sweetness that thins out fast, and then rosa damascena and rose du mai arrive deep and jammy, all petal and no stem.

Oudh and agar wood smoulder beneath the flowers until they read cured instead of picked, nearer tobacco than garden. Amber warms it against skin and every edge goes supple.

A small shop on Columbia Road, leased in 1985 by a costume designer who began with potpourri and sold it into a street that fills with flowers every Sunday. The shop next door followed. Home blends came after that, then work made for skin, and the range now runs past forty individual blends.

Nothing is farmed out. A batch is developed, diluted and macerated in small quantities, left to mature, then filtered, bottled, labelled and packed inside the studio, with British craftspeople and long standing partners at the other end of it. Kate Evans has run the house since 2017, after nineteen years buying fashion for Harrods and Harvey Nichols, and the Atelier Collection is a separate line, drawn out of a family history of cloth. Velvet is knotted at every lid there by hand.