Frédéric Malle: Creating a Home Worthy of Perfume

I have two objectives: giving great artists complete freedom, then having a place where customers can discover their work.
Frédéric Malle, translated from French

In June 2000, Frédéric Malle opened his first perfume shop on rue de Grenelle in Paris. It was the starting point for a perfume publishing house that presented perfumers as authors and brought their work to customers. What Malle needed was perfume created freely, and a place where people could take their time choosing it.

Stores with different characters followed in Paris, New York, Rome, Shanghai and elsewhere. Some welcome visitors into rooms that feel like a home; others use mirrors to unsettle the sense of distance. To convey the individuality of the fragrances, the stores themselves were given individual identities.

Contents

The First Shop
1. Connecting Perfumers and Customers
2. The Former Rue de Grenelle Boutique
The Thinking Behind the Stores
1. Encountering the Fragrance Itself
2. Bookshop Displays and Architecture for Each City
Boutiques to Visit
1. The Marais Boutique
2. The Rue Cambon Boutique
References

The First Shop

Connecting Perfumers and Customers

Malle had worked closely with perfumers at the fragrance company Roure Bertrand Dupont. Even talented creators struggled to express their individuality when every brief was shaped by market research. Meanwhile, people who loved perfume were turning away from increasingly similar products. He wondered whether he could bring the two sides together again.

Working with perfumers as a publisher selects writers and their works, supporting the creative process and bringing the finished perfumes to the public: that was the idea behind Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle. The bottles carried both the fragrance’s title and its author’s name, while the shop helped visitors find the work that suited them. From the outset, creation and retail were connected parts of the same undertaking.

The Former Rue de Grenelle Boutique

The first shop was at 37 rue de Grenelle, near the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighbourhood. Malle envisaged its approximately 58-square-metre interior as an extension of his Paris home. Since he would spend much of his time there and welcome friends, he wanted a restful room removed from the noise of the street.

With advice from Andrée Putman and the assistance of Olivier Lempereur, he brought together wooden wall panels and a concrete floor. The wood took its cue from Carlo Scarpa’s displays at the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, while the floor drew on contemporary art galleries in New York.

Malle’s own tastes appeared in Jean Prouvé furniture, African art, photographs and prints. Rather than imposing a uniform style, the room allowed different objects to find harmony together.

A small workroom above the shop held an accumulation of records of perfume trials. With fragrance development continuing close to the sales floor, the shop expressed the closeness between editor and customer. The former rue de Grenelle boutique has now closed, but its way of welcoming visitors as if into a home continued in later stores.

The Thinking Behind the Stores

Encountering the Fragrance Itself

Rather than determining a fragrance’s image in advance, Malle wanted people to discover their relationship with it through the actual scent. Leaving room for that encounter mattered to him.

I wanted to be very neutral and for people to really focus on the smell itself.
Frédéric Malle

The former rue de Grenelle shop also introduced cylindrical devices for experiencing fragrance, the Colonnes à Sentir. Tools for trying perfume were incorporated into the furniture used to display it. Together with conversations with staff, they supported the process through which visitors made their own choice.

Bookshop Displays and Architecture for Each City

Bottles identifying the authors, displays like bookshelves holding their works, and portraits of perfumers on the walls: the publishing-house idea also shaped how the perfumes were arranged. The boxes drew on French publishing culture, with red for perfume and blue for the home-fragrance collection launched in 2009.

A shared idea need not lead to a single architectural answer. Different architects and designers created the spaces, including Steven Holl and Patrick Naggar in New York, and Ciguë in Shanghai. The process of choosing a fragrance remains, while the setting responds to its city and building. The contrast between the Marais and rue Cambon boutiques in Paris makes this especially clear.

Boutiques to Visit

The Marais Boutique

Dominique Jakob and Brendan MacFarlane designed the Marais boutique on rue des Francs-Bourgeois. Malle had long admired their Georges restaurant at the Centre Pompidou. Revisiting Florence Loewy’s bookshop in the Marais also helped inspire him to create a shop of his own in the neighbourhood.

The idea was to insert a mirrored box into a historic building, with a structure seeming to float inside it like an island. The display framework continues through its reflections, making the room’s actual boundaries difficult to grasp.

The biggest surprise of the boutique is that you do not know where it ends.
Brendan MacFarlane

The small shop, around 24 square metres, combines reflective walls, a polished stainless-steel ceiling and a matt stainless-steel floor. Wooden shelves can display either a single perfume or a group of works, while four small tables in the centre allow customers to sit and try the fragrances.

The lighting was designed in three layers: tiny LEDs beneath the bottles, light from behind the shelves and ceiling spotlights. Controls adjust the brightness from morning to evening, creating a place to take time with fragrance amid mirrors and light. Rather than merely disguising the small floor area, the architecture also expresses perfume’s ability to lead us into another sensory experience.

The Rue Cambon Boutique

The shop at 10 rue Cambon replaced the nearby rue du Mont Thabor boutique. Its history is separate from that of the former rue de Grenelle store.

In the approximately 70-square-metre space, the building’s surviving beige stone arches and the terrazzo connecting the floor and central counters catch the eye. Metal smelling columns gleam against light oak shelving. Red and blue distinguish perfumes from home fragrances within a single shop.

Illustration of Frédéric Malle’s rue Cambon boutique, showing blue walls, pale stone arches and cylindrical tables. — Interior of the rue Cambon boutique (illustration)

The displays offer different ways to choose. Alongside categories that help customers explore fragrance by mood or impression, a library beside the consultation desk groups works by perfumer. Visitors can discover an author through a bottle that interests them, or move from a favourite perfumer to another of their creations.

A blue corner is devoted to home fragrances, including candles and room sprays. From scent worn on the body to fragrance for the spaces we live in, the shop lets visitors explore the same authors’ worlds in different settings.