Ambient scenting - treating a space with fragrance to enhance the experience of being there - is coming into its own as a design and lifestyle element. Branding consultants and fragrance experts say that how a place smells should be as important as the colour of the walls, comfort of furniture and correct air-conditioner settings. And enough people - from decision makers at corporations to individual home owners - are falling into line with that philosophy, consulting specialists to help them create just the right kind of scent. Experts say that the use of smells to impart a certain emotion is nothing new: for decades casinos in Las Vegas have used ambient scent to mask the odour of cigarettes around gaming tables, restaurants to cover the smell of seafood and luxury hotels to bring a sense of calm to their lobbies. And home fragrances - everything from atomiser spritzers to chunky scented candles - have been a buoyant business. But the level of customisation that companies and individuals are now seeking in their spaces is unprecedented. 'Many spaces have long had a particular scent, but it wasn't done deliberately,' says New York-based Sharon Graubard, senior vice-president of trend analysis at Stylesight, a global company that specialises in forecasting trends. She says that in the early days of Barneys department store, when it was the only store in New York selling the floral perfume Antonia's Flowers, its new cosmetics area was associated with that scent. 'Now designer boutiques often smell of the perfume the house creates, or use scent to differentiate themselves,' Graubard says. Recently it has been not just boutique owners and hotel developers using scents to stand out from the crowd: individuals are seeking out that same effect in their private spaces, often wanting the degree of personalisation they require from a fragrance they put on their bodies. Simon Faure-Field, CEO of branding company Equal Strategy, says he was recently asked to concoct fragrances for the Singapore and Hong Kong homes of the CEO of a major private bank. The firm, which has offices in Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, and whose core business is fragrance creation, spread the scents through the centralised air-conditioning system. 'It's the next big thing to incorporate those touch points of scenting a business or retail space in your personal domain,' Faure-Field says. 'You want people to be thinking about your home in an emotional, pleasant way. Your friends come over and they think, 'What a lovely fragrance.' In helping custom-create fragrances for clients, he works with one of the top three fragrance houses in the world. Jobs have increasingly involved scenting homes, he says, for which he follows a template: vanilla is great for a family environment and appeals to everyone. Ambient scents, like ones that are used on the skin, are best when layered, and, he says, he often blends up to 45 individual scents to achieve the perfect result. 'If someone wants a space to be quite relaxing, we put vanilla on the bottom, and if a home has a lot of wood, we choose a scent that has wood lower notes so it is complementary to the space,' he says. For a home that is very modern and contemporary - think sleek chrome and glass - he suggests 'something very fresh and clean, perhaps a ginger-lime scent'. There are numerous ways of dispensing a scent into any interior space, home or otherwise. Graubard says there are new hi-tech delivery systems that disperse fragrances into larger spaces. 'Many of these electric diffusers use oils and can cover huge areas, like dance floors in nightclubs, while keeping the purity of the fragrance.' Mindy Yang, vice-president and curator of MiN New York Apothecary & Atelier, which offers bespoke fragrances for people and homes, has also noticed an uptick in demand for customised scents for homes. Recently, one New York-based Middle Eastern woman asked Yang to create a scent for her home based on a perfume she grew up with and which had since been discontinued. 'She was desperate to recreate the scent,' Yang says. 'Instead of just buying a candle, diffuser or room spray, she wanted us to home in on a fragrance formulation.' Creating a customised scent for the home is as pricey as it sounds: Yang put the price tag at US$10,000 and up. She has offered the service to a number of wealthy Texans with huge houses as well as affluent New Yorkers, and has fielded inquiries from Brazil, Russia and Shanghai. Her clients apparently tell her the price tag is worth it. If US$10,000 is a little out of reach, her company offers a portfolio of what she describes as 'turnkey' fragrances - choose one, and it's ready to go - whether diffused via the home's air-conditioning vents or delivered in more traditional ways. But she does find herself following a set of rules as to what works where: she has noticed that the smell of talcum powder makes people feel safe, that peppermint and citrus notes like lemon and lime make them alert, the smell of barbecue smoke makes a room seem smaller, while the lingering aroma of cucumber in the air makes a space seem larger. Sometimes, the scent can be derived from something totally out of the ordinary. 'Sometimes a space is not scented in the traditional sense, but has its own smell because of a combination of furniture wax, clean tiles, old books and cut flowers. I think this is the authentic ideal that 'bottled' scents try to capture,' Graubard says. 45 Simon Faure-Field says he often blends up to this number of individual scents to achieve the perfect match for a person's needs
