Shantung Dream

Gardenia gone creamy.

Silk woven by hand keeps a slub in it, a thickening in the thread where the smooth surface gives way and something turns up that nobody put there. Imperfect luxury.

Neroli and petitgrain arrive bright and faintly bitter, orange blossom on warm air out of the Moorish gardens of Majorca. Gardenia and jasmine spread thick and creamy behind them. Fig reads leaf before fruit, sandalwood and tonka go resinous underneath, and amber holds the heat coming off baked terracotta.

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.