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| Carlos Huber at Bloom image: Bloom |
Although I remain a massive fan of the brand, I find myself unable to give an unqualified thumbs up to Arquiste‘s new The Architects Club (composed by Yann Vasnier). Several critics have been won over by what they’ve read as its gorgeous presentation of vanilla, but I haven’t been affected in quite the same way. I love the scent’s opening – an expertly-balanced, boozy, peppery evocation of the interior of Claridge’s Fumoir – but as it develops, its complexity appears to diminish: to my nose, the vanillic drydown isn’t as multi-layered and compelling as it could have been. Perhaps that’s the perfume’s inadvertent statement on the profession referred to by its name. Architects need to have an artistic temperament, but they must also ensure that their work is grounded in prosaic, physical realities. Maybe that’s why the scent feels like it’s holding back and keeping its more free-spirited impulses in check. It’s a compelling explanation, but it doesn’t make it any easier to accept that, as an olfactory representation of the Fumoir, the scent doesn’t come across as sufficiently debonair. So when I met up with Arquiste’s founder, Carlos Huber, at London’s Bloom perfumery in October, I began our conversation by asking him why the vanilla in The Architects Club isn’t more engrossing and more elaborate.
Carlos Huber: Like anything in life, when you have a creative journey, you have a stance on something. For example, conservation and preservation is regarded as a very straightforward career: you basically work with something that is established. You’re going to take a building and you have to be very faithful to it and return it to its accurate space, to the most faithful representation of what it was like when it was built. But that’s actually not true. There’s always a position behind it, there’s always an interpretation behind it. And the interpretation of the restorer or the preservationist is always going to be of his own time and place and what he finds significant. That is a position that I think is very honest in anything creative, especially in perfume. So it’s about an interpretation. You want to have an interpretation that is as close and as objective as possible to the truth. This vanilla wasn’t about darkness. It wasn’t about a syrupy vanilla, or an animalic vanilla. It was about a comforting, cosy, cocoon-like vanilla. The cocoon environment of the Fumoir. It was also about a very polished vanilla. That’s what I really like about it. And it also felt atmospheric.
P: How have your perfumes been received outside the US? Have their been any surprises?
CH: I didn’t expect Infanta En Flor to work well with a demographic that’s more Middle Eastern. I also didn’t expect for it to work well in Spain. It is a very Spanish fragrance, but I thought they would find it so familiar that it wouldn’t be interesting to a niche perfumista. But it has worked really well there.
CH: Fleur De Louis is definitely not our best seller, but I find it one of our most beautiful scents. It’s more particular and more classic, and maybe that’s not what a lot of people are looking for in niche.
P: You portray a very particular image of yourself and of the brand on social media. You always seem to be posting photos which you’ve taken in interesting destinations around the world. Is that an accurate reflection of your life now or is it a carefully-constructed projection?
P: People who’ve worked on films say the process is actually much more boring than they’d imagined: they say there’s a lot of sitting around on the set, just waiting. What’s the perfumery equivalent of sitting around on set?
CH: Oh my God, yes, of course! I met this woman who has all the Arquistes in her house, and she gave me a book about a garden called Ninfa, south of Rome. It used to be a medieval city that was conquered and it fell to ruin. This Italian family basically turned the whole dilapidated, ruined village into a garden. And she was like, ‘I think you would love this.’ The beautiful thing about travelling is that you are constantly in new environments, you’re experiencing different things and different stories.
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Persolaise
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