We are fragrance lovers so it was natural to explore something as amazing as a niche perfume brand.
Ignacio Cadena
How the shops began
A secret garden in Polanco
The Mexican brand Xinú began with an idea from Verónica Peña. Designers Ignacio Cadena and Héctor Esrawe joined her. The two had already worked together on a variety of spaces. Peña’s interest in fragrance met their work in graphics, furniture and architecture.
The shops began with a showroom in Mexico City’s Polanco neighbourhood. Designed in 2016, the space led visitors towards a hidden garden rather than displaying products to a main street. Ringing a bell downstairs and climbing a dark staircase brought them to a sunlit upper floor and a rooftop terrace filled with plants.
A single large display table stood at the centre of the shop. It was not simply a surface for evenly spaced perfume bottles. Cadena personally selected and arranged illustrated books, lumps of glass, fresh flowers and other objects connected to the inspiration for the scents. This table, which Esrawe described as a naturalist’s, became the starting point for Xinú’s shops.
Opening a garden to the neighbourhood
The garden hidden upstairs in Polanco became a space in contact with the city at the new Juárez shop. The site had once been a car repair workshop. Rather than filling the empty plot with product shelves, the plan was to create a garden and place a wooden pavilion within it.
The spark came from the vision of gifting a garden to Juarez
Héctor Esrawe
Esrawe handled the architecture and construction details, while Cadena developed the storytelling and displays. By bringing the surrounding garden close to the interior where visitors choose a scent, they expressed the brand’s inspiration in the plants of the Americas both inside and outside the building.
Alongside Mexico City, the brand now has shops in Mérida, San Miguel de Allende and Oaxaca, and has also expanded to Aoyama in Tokyo.
The thinking behind the interiors
Gathering clues to a fragrance
The name Xinú means nose in Otomi. Its shops offer a place to discover with the eyes the plants from which scents come. In Polanco, stones, wood, resins, glass and brass were gathered on a seven-metre-long table for this purpose. Natural specimens and handmade objects sit side by side on a single surface.
The richness of the Americas’ plant life, design and craftsmanship, and care for materials are the principles around which the shop is built. Rather than covering the walls with explanations of perfumes, it presents objects that suggest the shapes and textures of their materials. The bottles, too, are designed as part of that landscape.
For Cadena, nurturing a brand is something like raising a child.
It’s like our son, because it needs a lot of care
Ignacio Cadena
At Xinú, the brand he describes in this way, thought is given even to what happens to the container after its perfume has been used up. The bottles combine wood and clear glass, with the hope that they will be used again, perhaps as small vases. The plants and glass vessels in the shop connect with the bottle a customer takes home.
Shops to explore
Polanco, Mexico City
In Polanco, an upper floor of around 158 square metres and a planted terrace form the setting for choosing perfume. The objects on the display table are not simply neatly arranged product samples, but fragments of inspiration gathered over time. This is the shop in which to see the original space and the large table the two designers created for fragrance.
Juárez, Mexico City
A circular wooden pavilion takes centre stage at the Juárez shop. The vertical louvres around it can open and close, and also support shelves and display cases. As visitors move around the shop’s perimeter, the arrangement lets them see the products and the garden beyond together.
The pavilion uses laminated tornillo wood from FSC-certified forests in Peru. Instead of a single closed surface, its circular wall is made of movable sections that open towards the garden, connecting the places for perfume, home fragrance and incense with the planted surroundings.
The garden was the starting point for the design, rather than a way to decorate gaps left around a building. Planting around the pavilion and a layout that allows people to walk around it have changed the way this former workshop site is used.
Aoyama, Tokyo
The Aoyama shop became Xinú’s first overseas location. Within a concrete building designed by Satoshi Hirano Studio, Esrawe + Cadena created an experience across three levels. Black wooden beams cross inside, while street art based on the letter X has been added to the exterior.
As visitors move upstairs, the focus shifts from perfume worn on the skin to Haven, the range of scents for spaces. The top floor displays botanical specimens and raw materials, found objects, collages and other works. In Tokyo, the clues to fragrance gathered on a display table in the Mexican shops can be followed from one floor to the next.
