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When Lindsay Silberman first visited Aspen’s Hotel Jerome, she vividly recalls the smell of the hotel’s vintage leather armchairs, its roaring fireplace in the lobby and the occasional gust of crisp mountain air sneaking in from the outside. “Whenever I would stay at a five-star hotel, I’d think, ‘I need my house to smell like this,’” said Silberman, who’d spent a decade writing about luxury travel for magazines before launching Hotel Lobby Candle, a brand inspired by the idea that it’s entirely possible to bring the luxury hotel experience into your home in the form of a candle.

Photography by Lindsay Silberman

Her experience at Hotel Jerome translated to a custom candle, ‘Aspen,’ created in collaboration with the property, with notes of vintage cedar wood, tooled leather and golden embers alongside cooling notes of snow-capped pine. Hotel Lobby Candle’s latest launch, ‘Napa Valley,’ created in partnership with Solage Auberge in Calistoga, California, pairs notes of ripe black currant, aged French oak, mulberry trees and sweet soil in homage to Napa Valley and the romance of its harvest.

“The inspiration for the scent came not only from the warm, inviting energy of the hotel but also the land itself and the process of making its famous wine: minerality of dirt, crisp air, ripe fruit, winding vines and oak barrels,” said Silberman. “One of the most memorable aspects of Solage, to me, are the teeming mulberry trees found throughout — so we knew that mulberry notes would also be integral to the fragrance.”

Photography by Ruben Ortiz

She’s one of the latest to take advantage of a new trend toward olfactive branding, with luxury hotels capitalizing on the idea that scent has the power to transport and create a sense of place. “From a marketing perspective, it’s an incredibly effective way of creating a lasting impression,” said Silberman.

When Valentina De Santis’ family bought what is now the famed Lake Como, Italy, hotel Passalacqua in 2018 — crowned the number one hotel in the world on the inaugural 50 Best Hotels list last year — she also welcomed her daughter Maria. To celebrate the baby’s arrival, a loved one gifted De Santis with a beautiful fragrance that reminded her of Maria. De Santis says that served as the impetus for creating ‘Aqua Como 1787,’ Passalacqua’s first custom fragrance, which is diffused throughout the hotel and sold in its retail shop.

Photography by Sense of Lake

The scent takes inspiration from the gardens throughout the property, featuring English roses, olives, heirloom apples and pears, oranges and lemons, sweet grapes, hydrangeas, and cypress and cedar trees. “There are many ways to engage the guests when they arrive at the hotel — the design, the architecture of the spaces, the background music. But there is another essential sense, often underestimated, the sense of smell, which is an essential part of the guest experience,” said De Santis. “For our guests, ‘Aqua Como’ is a great way to bring them back to Passalacqua, to sweet memories of days spent on Lake Como, increasing the desire to return to Passalacqua.”

At Alma, a cafe, hotel and restaurant in Minneapolis, co-proprietor Margo Roberts introduced a “signature aromatic experience” to evoke “the notion of the four seasons,” she says. From crisp and clean summers and spicy falls to the austere scents of winter, Alma offers aromatherapy reed diffusers, candles, and natural bath and body products in every room to infuse the property with seasonal scents.

Photography by Jon Kreye

In November, The Hoxton Hotel in Chicago introduced its first-ever fragrance, ‘Bloommer,’ created in collaboration with Windy City perfumery Clue. “The hotel is meant to feel like a cozy home-away-from-home, almost like you’re crashing with an old friend,” said The Hoxton Chicago General Manager Amos Kelsey. “It’s so special to have a fragrance tied to that homey Chicago feeling.”

Inspired by the history of the hotel’s neighborhood in the Fulton Market district of the city — an area that was once the heart of Chicago’s manufacturing industry, perfumed by meatpacking plants, leatherworking factories and eventually the cocoa-scented clouds wafting from Bloommer Chocolate Factory — the scent collapses 130 years of Fulton Market into one distinctive smell. Imagine the richness of tanned leather combined with a hot burst of chocolate air, bitters shaken into a cocktail and the freshness of hotel linens.

Clue used several fragrance notes that feel adventurous for a hotel scent, like gourmands, which smell like food, such as cocoa, and animalics, like leather, which add a warm, sensual feel. Both are much more daring than the florals, teas, citruses and fresh scents one typically encounters in hotel lobbies. That was purposeful, says perfumer and Clue Perfumery co-founder Laura Oberwetter.

Photography provided by Clue Perfumery

“The olfactory bulb, the neural structure responsible for your sense of smell, shares a very intimate relationship with the limbic system, the network that regulates memory and emotion,” she explained. “It’s a fun neurological connection to lean into while traveling. Introducing a unique scent while away from home gives you the ability to establish a bond between that scent and the memories of your travels. It’s a tool that can be used for more vivid recall later.”

The brain first processes memory in the hippocampus, a small, horseshoe-shaped area in the temporal lobe, which has a special connection with olfaction in humans. And there’s a neurological basis for this privileged access between olfaction and memory: A new paper from Northwestern Medicine has suggested that smell — more so than other sensory stimuli like sight, sound or touch — has the most robust connectivity to the brain’s seat of memory, with researchers describing it as a “superhighway from smell to the hippocampus.”

Photography by Douglas Friedman

Not only are scents directly tethered to memories, but a study in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences found that odor-evoked memories were always more emotional than others. “Every time you encounter a new smell, you have an emotional reaction to the context the new smell was introduced in, and you store it in your memory,” explained Dawn Goldworm, co-founder and chief creative officer at the olfactive branding company 12.29. “Thus, your olfactive or smell memory becomes the largest and most acute part of your memory for life.”

When The Newbury Boston reopened in 2021 as a reimagined luxury hotel in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood, they turned to Goldworm and her team to help create a custom scent identity, one I encountered myself at the property in 2022. I loved it so much that I begged the concierge to let me buy the fragrance in some form, but it’s only available to take home as a memory.

Distributed throughout the property via a scent diffuser connected to the hotel’s ventilation system, the scent mixes notes of vetiver (earthy, human, addictive), cedarwood (smoky, dry, very much reminiscent of the fall season), sandalwood (offers a creamy softness), and tonka (vanilla, slightly sweet and sensual to make it feel warmer), along with marine notes that are “metallic and cool with a little bit of salicylate as a nod to the saltiness” that is ever-present in a hotel by the sea, says Carlos Bueno, The Newbury Boston’s managing director.

Photography by Nikolas Koenig

“We feel this scent gives our guests the sense of coming home,” said Bueno. “Like your logo, font in collateral or a playlist, hotel scents continue to be part of the overall hotel brand.”

Added Goldworm, “The original wood-burning fireplaces, Boston public park nearby and heritage address all add to the sophisticated, timeless and authentic scent that combines intimacy as the key emotion with a residential aesthetic.”

At J.K. Place in Paris, esteemed Italian perfumer Lorenzo Villoresi created a custom fragrance, ‘Alamut,’ that blends the hotel’s Italian heritage with its Parisian setting. The warm and sensual scent — a combination of rose, tuberose, jasmine, orange blossom, sandalwood, patchouli, musk and ambergris — is strategically diffused throughout the hotel via elegant fragrance vases.

“Having a signature scent enhances our brand identity and deepens our guest experience,” said Riccardo Ortogni, J.K. Place Paris general manager. “It creates an emotional connection that lives on well beyond a stay.”

Read this article as it appears in the magazine.

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