Ottoman

Dried rose, cold resin.

Rose arrives dusky, more dried petal than cut stem, and bois de rose keeps it woody so it never brightens. Olibanum and myrrh come in cool behind it, the resin smell of a cold stone room.

Sandalwood turns the middle creamy. Aged patchouli sits under the whole thing, dark and a little damp, and balsam of tolu sweetens the last of it without raising the temperature.

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.