Byredo Brings Its Scent Memories to SoHo

Ben Gorham was looking for his coasters.

Mr. Gorham, the founder of Byredo, the cult perfume line based in Stockholm, was in New York to supervise the opening of his store, at 62 Wooster Street, on Tuesday. Between the stacks of boxes and the construction workers and their drills, the coasters he designed for the shop’s sitting area, which includes furniture he also designed, were nowhere to be found.

Coasters may seem a strange detail for a perfumer, but Mr. Gorham, 37, has made a name for himself with his attention to minute detail and a willingness to pursue whimsical projects. When he founded Byredo in 2006, the idea was to “translate memories into smells,” he said. His first scents were Green (sage, orange and musk), recalling the way his father smelled, and Encens Chembur (temple incense, lemon, ginger), named after the place in India where his mother was born.

“I would say, ‘Here’s a place, there’s incense and wood,’ creating a kind of perfume brief,” Mr. Gorham said. He works with the perfumers Olivia Giacobetti and Jérôme Epinette to turn those memories into fragrances.

Now that he is more experienced, he is less literal, less inclined to simply replicate his own memories. “I can tackle emotions and difference notions that are abstract, like love and darkness,” he said.

Gypsy Water, a Byredo best seller, is based on “this glamorous idea of living in nature and being free,” he said, which translates in scent to juniper berry, pine needle, sandalwood and vanilla.

Mr. Gorham is a bit of an outsider in the perfume world, which tends to be insular and dominated by the French, or at least the French-trained. He’s accustomed to it. Born in Sweden to an Indian mother and a Canadian father, he grew up obsessed with basketball in a country where the sport isn’t exactly part of the national conversation. He was talented enough to play professionally in Europe, but quit at 26 to get a degree in fine arts in Stockholm.

Lanky and heavily tattooed, Mr. Gorham is also a bit of a beauty-world heartthrob. He once posed shirtless in a bed in the Bowery Hotel for the blog Into the Gloss, inspiring comments like “such a babe” and “this dude is beyond hot.” He’s still based in Stockholm, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.

The SoHo store, his second, is seven times the size of the first, in Stockholm. Beyond the perfume, candles and lotions, it will include a leather-goods line free of a visible brand name and hardware. And it will serve as a studio, a place for experiments, he said. An incense project, colors for cosmetics and ceramics are all in the works. The shop will also sell a perfume inspired by the scent of leather.

Mr. Gorham wanted to call the scent Hell’s Hundred Acres, a midcentury nickname for the SoHo district before luxury brands claimed much of the real estate. Names, he said, are tricky: “It has to capture the idea and make people want to pick it up and try it.”

SOURCE:http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/fashion/byredo-brings-its-scent-memories-to-soho.html