JARDINS D’ÉCRIVAINS: A ‘Garden of Writers’ Translating Great Literature into Fragrance

“Perfume notes have the power of words.”
— Anaïs Biguine​

Essential Information

Founded: 2011

Founder: Anaïs Biguine

Official website: https://www.jardinsdecrivains.com

Paris boutique: 15 rue des Tournelles, 75004 Paris (the Marais)​

The Founder and the Origins of the House

A Storyteller with Many Facets

Anaïs Biguine cannot be defined by a single professional title. She spent many years in the beauty industry as an artistic director, working across marketing, branding, and communications.
At the same time, she ran a talent agency representing 350 actors and continued to work as a photographer specializing in fashion, beauty, and still life. Behind this wide-ranging career, one might say, lay not so much a passion for work as an insatiable desire for expression itself.

There was another powerful pillar in her family life: literature. “Just as some families are passionate about sport, my family was full of love for literature and literary references,” Biguine has said. Her children read from an early age and were taken to museums around the world. She herself remained a devoted reader of nineteenth-century French literature, including Sand, Hugo, Maupassant, and Wilde, delving deeply into writers’ lives.​

A “Moment of Grace” on Guernsey

The turning point came one day on a journey.

Around 2010–2011, Biguine took her two daughters to Guernsey, an island in the English Channel. Their destination was Hauteville House, where Victor Hugo had lived in exile. With interiors designed by Hugo himself, the house was not merely a historic building, but a work of art in its own right.

“I went there and was completely captivated by the place. When I returned to my manor house in Normandy, I told myself, ‘I didn’t come here by chance. I can hear something.’ I knew it was some form of artistic expression. But what form? I didn’t know yet.”​

Watching her daughters in the garden, she felt an urge to “capture this moment in something.” As soon as she returned to her home in Normandy, she took action. First, she called in a waxworker and decided to begin making candles. She wanted to tell the stories of the places where Karen Blixen and Stefan Zweig had lived.

From Candles to Perfume: Choosing to Be Self-Taught

To make candles, she met an elderly supplier and spent hours listening to him describe the production process. She then established a collaboration with a laboratory in Grasse and completed her first candles.​

“I was happy to get my hands dirty, because I love gardening and cooking, and working with materials and textures. My hands always want to be doing something.”​

Her next leap came through meeting David Frossard, a distributor involved in developing designer perfumery. Having worked with brands such as BDK and Miller & Harris, he saw Biguine’s creative world and became convinced that she “had what it takes to invent a perfume.” He took her to Milan’s niche perfume fair, Excense. There, all her doubts fell away, and she set out to create her first fragrance.​

“I am entirely self-taught! But I create perfumes without constraints or inhibitions, aiming to describe an atmosphere within the very specific context of literature. Outside that context, perhaps I couldn’t make perfume.”​

The Birth of George, the First Fragrance

The first subject Biguine chose was George Sand, the nineteenth-century French writer.

“I feel as though I have always been studying George Sand. I know Nohant like the back of my hand, and I can spend hours beside her little cemetery. I even know the parts of Nohant that are not open to visitors. When I created this perfume, I let myself go. I wasn’t interested at all in making a fragrance that suited the times. I wanted to express her temperament. A slightly nocturnal Nohant: not the ‘good mistress of Nohant,’ but George Sand smoking a cigar, drinking coffee, relaxing in a hammock, and then writing.”​

In 2012, George, her first perfume, went on sale at the Parisian niche perfumery Jovoy-Castiglione. Perfume critic Alexis Toublanc described it at the time as a “cheeky fragrance,” which was exactly what Biguine had intended. And so Jardins d’Écrivains was born.​

The House’s Commitments

The Spirit of La Pléiade

Essential to understanding the philosophy of Jardins d’Écrivains is its spiritual affinity with La Pléiade, the prestigious literary collection published by the French publisher Gallimard. Housed in vegetable-tanned leather cases and known for its compact, exquisitely crafted bindings, La Pléiade is cherished in the French-speaking world as a “symbol of literary authority.”​

The perfume bottles of Jardins d’Écrivains are also housed in vegetable-tanned leather cases. The leather is sourced from a renowned French tannery established in the sixteenth century, and each piece is finished by hand. The design seems to embody the idea of perfume and books as objects that are both “held in the hand, opened, and capable of taking us into another world.”

The Philosophy of “Narrative Fragrance”

“I specialize in narrative fragrances. I am deeply drawn to history and stories.”​

A conviction Biguine emphasizes repeatedly is that “literature is not a tool for following trends.”

“When I approached literature, my idea was to take on the full responsibility of dealing with such a noble subject. Turning a theme so sublime into a cheap by-product for profit was out of the question.”​

The creative process begins with exhaustive research. After becoming intimately familiar with a writer’s life, work, and homes, she translates their “temperament” into fragrance notes. She orders raw materials from Grasse, builds a composition, and sends it to the laboratory to have its chemical balance adjusted. The exchange resembles proofreading a manuscript: she finishes the work by sending instructions such as “It’s too strong,” “The rhythm is flat,” or “Make the top notes last a little longer.”​

“Whatever is fashionable is already out of fashion for me.”​

This approach produces perfumes that move freely through time. From the ancient philosophical garden of Epicurus to nineteenth-century Paris and the San Francisco of the Beat Generation, the collection refuses all constraints.​

The Fragrance Collection

Anaïs Biguine herself composes every fragrance; the work is not outsourced to external perfumers. The following introduces representative creations and the structure of the collection.

The Founding Collection (2012–2015)

The seven early creations that laid the house’s foundations capture nineteenth-century literary greats and aestheticist characters in fragrance.

• George (2012): The landmark first fragrance, inspired by George Sand. Cigar smoke, coffee, tobacco, and myrrh intertwine to embody the powerful personality of the “nocturnal mistress” of Nohant after dark.
• La Dame aux Camélias (2012): A fragrance inspired by Alexandre Dumas fils’s novel The Lady of the Camellias. A fruity floral bouquet, it is positioned as an evening scent.​
• Gigi (2012): Inspired by Gigi, the character in Colette’s novella. Cut grass, orange blossom, tuberose, jasmine, and blackcurrant combine in a white floral with the clean freshness of a spring meadow.
• Wilde (2013): A fragrance translating Oscar Wilde’s dandyism into scent. Its notes include carnation, then a symbol of homosexuality, grapes (a reference to Salomé), fig, and oakmoss.
• Orlando (2013): Inspired by the androgynous character in Virginia Woolf’s novel of the same name. A spicy opening transforms into an incense base, expressing a complexity that transcends gender.​
• Junky (2014): A challenging creation inspired by William S. Burroughs’s autobiographical novel. The botanical greenness of hemp, galbanum, iris, and woods portray the world of drug addiction from a “non-redemptive perspective.”​
• Marlowe (2015): Inspired by the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. A “dense, decadent, and theatrical” composition of tuberose, osmanthus, myrrh, leather, and chypre.​

The Poets Collection (2018–2020s)

Around 2018, Jardins d’Écrivains began expanding into a wider range of genres, with a particularly noticeable deepening of its exploration of poetry and twentieth-century literature.​

• Exil (2018): Inspired by the poetry collection of the same name by Saint-John Perse. Following the theme “I will live in my name,” eucalyptus, thyme, clove, amber, musk, and cedar evoke a primordial fertile landscape.
• Howl (2018): A Beat Generation fragrance inspired by Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl. Lavandin, thyme, geranium, cinnamon, patchouli, and musk express a “desperate yearning for freedom.”
• Alcools (2018): Inspired by Guillaume Apollinaire’s poetry collection. Artemisia (wormwood), birch, lilac, tonka bean, benzoin, and styrax create an “elixir of leather maceration.”​
• Loy (2019): Inspired by the British avant-garde poet Mina Loy (1882–1966). A floral woody fragrance of rose, jasmine, saffron, vetiver, and sandalwood.
• Morris: Inspired by William Morris. Distinguished by the roaring freshness of wintergreen, it evokes an otherworldly atmosphere like “the back of Narnia’s wardrobe.”​

The L’Eau de Series

Developed from around 2018, this series comprises lighter fragrance compositions bearing the names of writers and poets. It offers tributes to authors from diverse cultural backgrounds, including Leopardi, Kakuzō (Okakura Kakuzō), Blixen, Marceline (Desbordes-Valmore), and Taïpi (Melville).​

Distinctive Standalone Creations

• Ajar (2017): Inspired by “Émile Ajar,” the pseudonym under which Romain Gary concealed his identity. Incense, orchid, bergamot, and sandalwood create a “game of light and shadow.”​
• Zorba (2021): Inspired by Nikos Kazantzakis’s Zorba the Greek. The wild vegetation of Crete, with carob, sea waves, garrigue (the scrublands of southern France), sage, cyclamen, and castoreum, portrays a “hunger for adventure.”
• Peau d’Âne (2022): A limited edition inspired by Perrault’s fairy tale Donkeyskin. An unusual composition of pine, flour, and suede conjures a supernatural fantasy.​

An Additional Note…

• Beyond Jardins d’Écrivains, Anaïs Biguine has created several fragrance brands, each with a different “narrative voice.” Gri-Gri explores the history of tattoos and the memory of skin; Les Cocottes de Paris is a sensual series inspired by the celebrated courtesans of nineteenth-century Paris; and Chapel Factory explores the world of sacred buildings and incense. Between Sea & Forest is a candle series centered on the natural landscape of her native Normandy.
• The name Jardins d’Écrivains, meaning “Writers’ Gardens,” encapsulates Biguine’s philosophy. What she values above all are the “places” and “spaces” in which writers lived. “For many writers, gardens were extremely important. I am deeply attached to houses and gardens,” she has said. George Sand’s garden at Nohant and Victor Hugo’s garden at Hauteville House: words and fragrances carrying these “memories of place” form an “alternative library” called Jardins d’Écrivains.​
• Jovoy Paris, the first shop to give Jardins d’Écrivains shelf space, was then a newly opened destination for niche perfumery. Its presence there from the beginning shows how quickly the brand won recognition from within the perfume community. Today, Printemps New York is its exclusive retail partner in the United States, and the house is represented in niche perfume stores in more than forty countries worldwide.