Piano Tuner

A grandfather never met, alive in family legend.

A life spent tuning pianos and playing jazz in Northern California, never accused of being boring: a little booze, a little jazz, a lot of trouble, and the sweet smell of redwoods. The redwood was foraged and upcycled in Humboldt County between 2020 and 2025 and extracted from bark, heartwood and sapwood, from fallen and rescued old-growth heartwood, from black "Diamond" sap from the fires of 2020, from fresh sap with more sap and bark aged seven years, and from cones and needles. The extra layer of smoke comes from the fires that hit the redwoods in the late summer of 2020. Anything removed from the redwoods was taken with knowledge of the local ecosystem and its soil, protective of regeneration, with cautious and limited removal of saps; the old growth was rescued from a wood pile.

Pomare's Stolen Perfume is the work of its founder, raised on a farm in the Northern Maine woods, with a mother's family from Tahiti. Spring on the farm meant the smell of thawing earth and spring grasses; the long winters meant fantasies of what Tahitian warmth would smell like. Most things in a bottle captured none of it the way it had been pictured, and so the founder found natural fragrance and began making tinctures and mixing oils and resins.

Working as a wine director and sommelier reinforced a passion for terroir, and the house celebrates regional and seasonal differences in natural ingredients, believing in small production with as little intervention as possible. Formulas pivot with the season, so one vintage differs from the last. The founder studied with the alchemist Mandy Aftel, and the house was named International Sustainable Brand of 2020 for its work with upcycled redwood.