Glass bottles and vials on a dark workbench

The Atelier · Grasse

A small room for a long craft.

Portrait of Genevieve Laurent in black and white

Genevieve LaurentFounder & perfumer

The Perfumer

Genevieve Laurent

Genevieve trained in Grasse, at the school above the old tannery quarter, where she spent two years learning to name fifteen hundred raw materials blind before she was allowed to blend any of them. She then spent a decade as a nose for larger houses in Paris and Geneva, composing for launches, briefs and seasons, and learning exactly how a fragrance is made to sell.

In 2014 she came back south to make the other kind. Solane is built around memory rather than trend: a grandmother’s rose garden, a cold chapel, a grove at the end of summer. She now works out of a small atelier on the edge of the old town, with an organ of four hundred materials, two assistants, and a cellar that holds every blend for eight weeks before it is poured.

A fragrance should smell like a moment, not a market.
Genevieve Laurent

400Materials at the organ

8Weeks in the cellar

300Bottles per edition

The work, up close

Five things on the bench this season, photographed as they are.

A bead of golden resin on weathered wood — i.
**Labdanum, before it is a note**Raw resin from the rockrose, gathered in Andalusia. Warmed, it smells of leather and honey.

Clear glass vials in black and white — ii.
**Trials**Geneviève took two hundred and eleven. Most of ours take forty.

Polished copper stills in a row — iii.
**The copper**Our distiller in the valley has run the same stills since 1971. Copper takes the sulphur out of the steam.

Dried flowers in macro, pale and brittle — iv.
**What the season leaves**Petals dried for tinctures and kept for the winter, when nothing is in flower.

Red liquid in a glass vessel among scattered petals — v.
**Maceration**Concentrate and alcohol, left together in the dark until they stop being two things.

Philosophy

We would rather make three hundred bottles someone remembers than three million no one does.

01Memory over trend

Every composition starts from a place or a moment, never a brief or a mood board.

02Materials we can name

We know which field each flower came from, and we print the harvest on every bottle.

03Time we don’t rush

Eight weeks in the cellar, filtered cold, poured by hand. An edition is finished when it is finished.

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