Marc Lefèvre works from a converted farmhouse in Grasse, the perfume capital of southern France. His studio is lined with hundreds of small brown bottles — essential oils, absolutes, and accords accumulated over two decades of fragrance design. It was here that he developed the scent collection for Gaia Luxury Interiors, and it is here that we begin our conversation.

How did you approach creating fragrances specifically for the home rather than the body?

It is an entirely different discipline. A personal fragrance is intimate — it exists in the space between your skin and another person. A home fragrance must fill a room without dominating it. You are competing with cooking smells, fresh air from open windows, the natural scent of wood and fabric. The composition must be assertive enough to be noticed but graceful enough to become part of the background. I think of it as designing the acoustic of a room rather than playing a melody.

Your compositions tend to feature unusual raw materials. What draws you to them?

I am interested in materials that tell a story. Anyone can buy synthetic jasmine and produce something pleasant. But when you work with jasmine absolute from Grasse — hand-picked at dawn, extracted over weeks — there is a complexity that no laboratory can reproduce. You can smell the soil, the altitude, the particular summer in which it was harvested. For the Gaia collection, I sourced cedarwood from the Atlas Mountains, iris root aged for three years in Tuscany, and a wild fig accord that I developed myself from leaves collected near my home. Each material carries a sense of place.

What role does memory play in your work?

Memory is everything. Scent is the most direct pathway to emotion — it bypasses the rational mind entirely. When I compose, I am not thinking about top notes and base notes in the technical sense. I am thinking about moments. The way a stone terrace smells after summer rain. The interior of an old library. Linen drying in the wind. If I can capture that feeling — not the literal smell, but the emotional residue of the experience — then the fragrance succeeds. People may not be able to name what they are smelling, but they will feel something. That is enough.

What is your advice for someone choosing a home fragrance for the first time?

Trust your instincts and ignore trends. A fragrance that moves you is always the right choice, regardless of what is fashionable. Live with a scent for a full day before deciding — first impressions can be misleading. And remember that a home fragrance is not air freshener. It should add a layer of beauty to your environment, not mask it. The best compliment I ever received was from a client who said my candle made her apartment feel like it had a soul. That is what we are trying to do.