Domaine
our ode to past and present
If you look up the word foundation in a dictionary you’ll find synonyms such as beginning, support, and starting point. All perfectly suited to describe how we feel about our fragrance producer and raw material sourcing company, Accords & Parfums in Cabris. They are our long-term support in everything we do as a perfume company and very much the foundation to make it work.
Domaine is our ode to them.
So, how does one go about translating this into scent? For that, we need to look back in time. Let’s go back to when one man decided to build his olfactive paradise.
Art & Parfums, as it was originally called, opened its doors in 1946 by the now legendary perfumer Edmond Roudnitska. High in the mountains above Grasse, he built the Domaine Sainte Blanche, an enchanted garden overlooking Cannes and the Lérins islands in the distance. A scented playground for anyone interested in the art of perfumery.
This is also where Mona spent 15 years of her life as Edmond’s apprentice and where Fredrik took his first briefs as a junior perfumer. Edmonds catalog of groundbreaking fragrances speaks for itself but there is one that is especially close to our hearts. Diorissimo by Dior!
Diorissimo was made in a more romantic age of perfumery. New olfactory molecules and scientific breakthroughs allowed perfumers to recreate previously impossible things. Continuously rewriting the rules of what a fragrance could be.
Lily of the Valley is a mute flower, it gives no useable quantities of oil, making it especially difficult to portray accurately in a fragrance. However, Edmond took on the challenge and created a classic. The Lily of the Valley flowers he originally used as an inspiration still grows at the Domaine Sainte Blanche.
Working on recreating mute flowers comes with its pros and cons. It requires the perfumer to combine synthetics and naturals, hiding certain parts and pushing others. Thankfully, it also gives the perfumer the opportunity to interpret it however they want.
Edmonds version is almost photorealistic, Fredrik’s creation for Domaine on the other hand comes with a rounder floral effect, built on a memory from one especially warm spring morning, on his way to work at Accords & Parfums.
If you’ve read the story about the Sainte Blanche from the Alinea collection, you know that getting to Accords & Parfums from the village of Cabris is quite the walk. It’s a long uphill hike until you reach the small back gate, that will take you directly into the gardens. It was after one of these climbs that Fredrik first met the famous patch of Lily of the Valley. Who knows if it was the warm weather, the large quantity of them or that they were just in bloom, to Fredrik, the intensity and volume of the scent itself were simply mind-blowing. An embrace of nature itself, waking from its wintery slumber.
Domaine is a fragrance where the past meets the present. It is an ode to what has been but also a celebration of what the future has in store. A story told by one of nature’s true miracles, the Lily of the Valley.
