Arquiste: An Architect Captures Memories of Time and Place in Scent

アーキストの世界観と代表製品「Nanban 100ml」を表現したブランドイメージ

“Whenever I was doing architectural research, reading about a building or a city, I would suddenly wonder, ‘What did it smell like there?’ Could that olfactory experience be restored? That was where it all began.”

— Carlos Huber, founder of Arquiste

Basic Information

Founded: 2011 (New York, United States)
Founder: Carlos Huber
Official website: https://arquiste.com

The name “Arquiste,” rendered “Ākisuto” in Japanese, may not be familiar to every reader. According to its authorized Japanese retailer, NOSE SHOP, the brand name is a coined word combining Architecture, History, Artist, and Archive, carrying the meaning of “value passed down across time.”

The Founder and the Brand’s Origins

A Boy with a Keen Nose, Growing Up in Mexico City

Carlos Huber was born and raised in Mexico City in a Jewish immigrant family with European roots. His grandfather came from Poland and owned a steel factory; his father was a dentist, his brother worked in the bicycle business, and his sister was an art curator. Within this entrepreneurial family, Carlos alone was drawn to design and history and chose architecture.

Carlos recalls having an especially sharp sense of smell from childhood.

“From about the age of five, my father would bring me little inexpensive bottles of cologne from the neighborhood drugstore, and that drew me into the world of fragrance and men’s grooming. I became obsessed with going from shop to shop and discovering new scents.”

The scent that welcomed him in Mexico City in those days was Agua de Colonia Sanborns, an orange-blossom eau de cologne sold by the local Sanborns drugstore chain. It remains a personal signature that he reportedly still uses before bed.

From Architecture to Preservation: Asking Why We Need Old Buildings

Carlos began studying architecture at Mexico City’s prestigious Universidad Iberoamericana, then spent a year at the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, and also gained practical experience in Bilbao, Spain.

The more he traveled, the more he became fascinated by the power of old buildings.

“One of the reasons I chose architecture was the chance to study its history. Walking through central Mexico City, visiting small colonial towns, and on my first trips to Europe, I was captivated by old buildings.”

While in Bilbao, he learned about a Historic Preservation program in New York, an academic field specializing in the conservation and restoration of historic buildings. He went on to graduate school at Columbia University, earning his master’s degree with distinction.

A Turning Point at Polo Ralph Lauren

After graduating from Columbia, Carlos entered the world of fashion brands. He joined Polo Ralph Lauren’s architecture team, beginning a period of working on store development and design.

“For the first time, I experienced a moment when the worlds of retail, fashion, merchandising, architecture, and preservation intersected. Around then, I became friends with perfumers Yann Vasnier and Rodrigo Flores-Roux and fragrance evaluator Sophie Bensamou. I had always been interested in scent, so I really enjoyed learning from them.”

The gifted fellow Mexican he met was Rodrigo Flores-Roux, master perfumer at Givaudan, one of the world’s leading fragrance companies.

A Year of Mentorship: Learning from Flores-Roux

Rodrigo Flores-Roux’s recollection of meeting Carlos is intriguing.

“I had a colleague I was very close to, and one day over lunch Yann Vasnier showed me Carlos’s Facebook page. He was incredibly handsome, and intelligent too. So we arranged a lunch for the four of us, and we hit it off.”

Carlos soon asked Rodrigo for formal mentorship and received private instruction in perfume history, evaluation, and development for at least a year.

“We were very formal during lessons, and then over dinner we would discuss the history of perfume late into the night. We spent a year researching the story behind each fragrance, visiting the locations, spending days in libraries and archives, and asking botanists, historians, and chefs for clues to the scents.”

Through this process, Carlos discovered deep similarities between architecture and perfumery.

“Architecture and fragrance are both experiences. Both have structures made of layers: foundations as base notes, the structure itself as heart notes, and decoration as top notes. And both are deeply tied to a particular place, the spirit of an age, and a culture.”

The Birth of Arquiste

Thus, Arquiste Parfumeur was established in New York in 2011. Its first collection comprised six perfumes based on six historic moments, ranging from Calabria in 1175 to St. Petersburg in 1837. Distribution through select retailers including Barneys New York began in 2012, and in January 2013, it received Fashion Group International’s Rising Star Award in the Beauty & Fragrance Entrepreneur category.

What Defines the Brand

Scent as Restoration: Bringing an Architectural Approach to Perfume

At the heart of Arquiste’s philosophy is the idea of bringing the architectural concept of historic preservation and restoration directly into perfume creation.

“Arquiste was born from an experiment in restoring moments from the past and experiences connected to the past, and breathing new life into them. Like Frankenstein, it is a matter of bringing substance back to life with the spark of a smell.”

Work on each perfume begins with extensive historical research by Carlos. Site visits, research in libraries and archives, and interviews with botanists, historians, and cooks lead to a detailed brief, a blueprint for the scent. These documents are said to be so long and detailed that they resemble academic papers, prompting Carlos himself to joke that they are “not actually very brief.”

Carlos describes collaboration with perfumers in these terms:

“To work together, you need to click: a shared interest in history and art, humor, and warmth. The perfumers I work with are my friends and my mentors.”

A Scent Signature: Ambermax and Complex Storytelling

In an interview, Carlos identified Ambermax, a synthetic material developed by Givaudan, as a signature ingredient linking Arquiste’s creations.

“It is a synthetic material made by Givaudan, but it has a salty nuance, almost like slightly perspiring skin, without smelling sweaty. It smells of clean skin, with just a little bitterness. It gives a fragrance a human element.”

Carlos also explicitly says that he likes complex, “talkative” fragrances.

“I like those accumulating layers where, as a fragrance lives on the skin, at one moment you sense a little of this, and at another, a little of that. I like fragrances that have depth without necessarily being strong.”

His approach to the quality of materials is equally clear.

“Quality is the criterion. A bad natural material is no different from a bad synthetic one. A good synthetic can be truly wonderful. But nothing quite matches the preciousness of an exceptional natural material.”

Bottle and Packaging Design

The brand’s bottles use the highest-quality glass, produced in a factory in Parma, Italy, and are distinguished by an ergonomic, rounded form.

Carlos describes the design intent as follows:

“I wanted a round, easy-to-use bottle that would fit in the hand, something that would not overwhelm the concept of each perfume. I like the feeling of a fragrance grenade.”

The bottle has a metal cap engraved with the brand’s “A” logo and uses the latest crystal spray-tube technology. Its box has a minimalist black-and-white design, symbolizing the fusion of respect for history with modernity. In 2024, the boxes were also refreshed with a more architectural look.

Fragrance Lineup

Each Arquiste perfume has historical coordinates: a particular time and place. Rather than covering every product, this section introduces the structure of the collection and representative lines.

The Launch Collection (2011–2012)

The 2011 debut collection comprised six perfumes, followed by several more. They were all created by Rodrigo Flores-Roux and Yann Vasnier.

Fleur de Louis recreates in scent the betrothal of Louis XIV and the Spanish infanta, or princess, Maria Theresa, on a small island on the French-Spanish border in June 1660. It is distinguished by the aromas of orange blossom, jasmine, and orris, the root of the iris, blooming inside a pavilion filled with the scent of freshly cut pine and cedar.

Infanta en Flor portrays the same scene from the Spanish princess’s perspective, with the scents of orange-flower water, Spanish leather, cistus resin, and immortelle.

Anima Dulcis is set in the kitchens of the Royal Convent of Jesús María in Mexico City in November 1695. The idea arose from Carlos’s own experience of working on the building’s restoration. Founded by female descendants of Spanish conquistadors, the convent was home to nuns who preserved secret recipes combining ingredients from Europe, Asia, and indigenous Mexico. As the name Anima Dulcis, “sweet soul,” suggests, it is a baroque gourmand, or food-evoking, fragrance starring cacao absolute, Mexican vanilla, cinnamon, and smoked chili.

Aleksandr recreates the afternoon of the duel in which poet Aleksandr Pushkin was fatally wounded in St. Petersburg in January 1837. Neroli, violet leaf, fir balsam, Russian leather, and orris weave together the scents of the poet’s toilette and the winter landscape. It was created by Yann Vasnier.

Representative Fragrances

Nanban is set on the Pacific Ocean in January 1618. The name Nanban was once used in Japan to refer to Western goods and culture. It recreates the smells of spices, coffee, leather, frankincense, and sandalwood in the dark hold of a Japanese galleon carrying a diplomatic mission, shortly before the Tokugawa shogunate ended exchanges with the West. The idea grew out of Carlos’s first trip to Japan in 2014. It was composed by Rodrigo Flores-Roux.

Misfit is set in Marseille in September 1877. Centered on patchouli, which was hugely popular among the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie before being adopted by outsiders, it is composed with French lavender, ambrette-seed absolute, Venezuelan tonka bean, and tolu balsam. It won Indie Fragrance of the Year at the 2021 Fragrance Foundation Awards.

Sydney Rock Pool is an unusual Arquiste creation set in the contemporary world, in Sydney in January 2016. Australian sandalwood, frangipani, jasmine sambac, Ambermax, and a sea-salt accord evoke the memory of skin just after leaving the beach. Carlos began working on it shortly after Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election. “I made this fragrance as a place to escape reality for a moment, a symbol of mindfulness,” he says.

L’Or de Louis, announced in 2023, is centered on orange-blossom absolute and, according to the Fragrance Foundation’s official award record, won Indie Fragrance of the Year in 2024. It expresses in scent a scene in April 1687, when fires lit for the Sun King, Louis XIV, warmed orange trees and brought them into bloom in the Grand Orangerie at the Palace of Versailles. The bottle contains real 24-karat gold flakes. Rodrigo Flores-Roux and Carlos reportedly refined the creation over at least twelve years.

Recent collections have also added creations by perfumer Calice Becker. Almond Suede is a marzipan-and-leather fragrance set in Córdoba, Al-Andalus, in 810; Venice Rococo is a powdery floral clothed in the Rococo style of eighteenth-century Venice; and A Grove by the Sea is an Adriatic scent set in a Mediterranean fig grove.

Incidentally…

Readers may notice that many of Carlos’s fragrances relate to water and voyages: Arquiste, Nanban, Fleur de Louis, Sydney Rock Pool, the Acapulco series Él and Ella, Dark Galleon…

“I love water, and I am very much a waterside person myself. But water appears so often partly because, historically, it is connected with travel, migration, and exchange. My own roots are that kind of story. The way migrants move around the world is a starting point for my work.”

The duo Él and Ella is also unusually based on personal memories. Its inspiration came from his parents’ stories about Acapulco’s jet-set culture in the 1970s. As fragrances translating family oral history rather than a historical episode, they have a slightly different character within Arquiste.

To add a note on the origin of the brand name, Arquiste is also described as a coined word layering the Spanish arquitectura, meaning architecture, with words suggestive of artists and archives. It is therefore often pronounced “Ākisuto” in Japanese, and a broadly similar “ar-keest” pronunciation appears to be common in English-speaking countries. An official pronunciation guide, however, could not be confirmed in publicly available information.

References