I caught up with a friend at the weekend who moved house around the same time that we did and she said something that really resonated: “it definitely feels like home now, the smell of the old owners has gone and it finally smells like us.”
The house didn’t ‘smell’ before of course, but I knew exactly what she meant. Whether it’s the flowers we favour or even something as simple as our choice of laundry detergent, people’s homes have their own certain scent about them.
Since we moved in April (I wrote about the stressful process here), I’ve been on a mission to make our new home smell AMAZING. Unfortunately though, I seem to have the world’s fussiest nose and tend to despise nearly every single air freshener, candle or bowl of humble pot pourri that I come across. I’ll never understand the appeal of chemically fake sugary scents. I love cake, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want my bathroom to smell like a bakery.
My favourite scents are woody and green, with my very favourite home scent being fig, but even that seems to be tricky to track down in a formulation that meets my ridiculous requirements. If I don’t want to bankrupt myself sticking solely to Diptyque, that is.
I’ve tried reed diffusers from 10 or so brands and I have finally found an affordable favourite – Fig Luxury Perfume Room Diffuser by Parks. (Pictured above). It’s currently on Amazon for £29.99 but I bought mine for less than a tenner each from TK Maxx. I stockpiled these when they were on sale, so I have this diffuser in most rooms and a few back-up ones still in their boxes in the kitchen cupboard. (Obsessed much?!).
Reed diffusers are great because they really do fill the room with fragrance (remember to turn the sticks each week) unlike candles which usually need to be lit to really scent a room of any size.
If money was no object I’d invest in Diptyque’s beautiful electric diffuser – ‘Un Air de Diptyque’ (£240) – and have my home smell of their Figuier scent all day long, but for now it’s just my wardrobe getting the Diptyque treatment.
Scenting a wardrobe may not seem like the world’s most obvious thing to do, but as wardrobes are confined spaces they’re really easy to scent and doing so comes with the added bonus of bringing a smile to your face every time you open the doors and deliberate over what to wear.
In one of my wardrobes I have Diptyque’s Figuier Scented Oval (£32)…
…and in the other I have Diptyque’s 34 Boulevard Saint Germain Scented Oval (£34).
34 is a truly captivating scent, it has notes of sun-dried fig leaves (biased, moi?!), damp mosses and crumpled blackcurrant leaves. It’s delicious.
You’d be forgiven for thinking candles would be an unnecessary addition with all of the above in place (ahem), but I do like to have candles by my desk, in the bedrooms and in the lounge. I don’t understand fragrance combining enough to light multiple scented candles at once, so I usually light lots of unscented candles and just one scented one.
