Oudh du Soleil

When smoke turns sweet.

Vanilla runs through the middle like a thread, sweet and thin, and never once takes the lead. The wood smoulders behind it, resinous where oudh often goes medicinal, with agarwood arriving late and dry.

Jasmine and ylang ylang lift a narrow band of sweetness up through the centre. Tonka and amber settle low against skin, and a strand of cedarwood carries a suggestion of hide out to the end.

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.