Luxury Briefing.

COCO Chanel said you should use perfume anywhere you expect to be kissed. Certainly, but I think you should use it in other places too. Why do planes smell so bad? Because penny-pinching airlines don’t use the air-conditioning (it burns more fuel) so you just sit there recycling pre-used air and the whiff of microwaved bacon. Virgin’s Pendolino trains have a cloacal miasma that would have disturbed an Early Christian in his foetid catacombs. How I long for a whiff of Miller Harris terre du bois when I am sitting cramped and unhappy in 17D.

Oddly, cars offer more positive experiences of how smell affects us. We all know that aspirational new-car smell, although I suspect it is a curiously British phenomenon since so many nuances of snobbery are involved. The smell of new vinyl or velour is one thing; the smell of new nappa leather something altogether different. Several model cycles ago Citroen attempted a perfume dispenser in one of its cars, but it did not work well and, besides, the range was limited, as I recall, to something like lemon or rose. Strange no one has attempted a permanent drip of eau de voiture nouvelle.

Smell is the most evocative sense because the part of the brain that processes olfactory inputs is adjacent to the part that processes memory. And because it is so intangible it excites notions of romance and space which are not limited by physical reality. Incidentally, that perfume is so intangible is the reason so very, very much is necessarily spent on packaging it. More, I am saying, should be spent on perfume delivery systems. That there’s a powerful latent demand is shown by the extraordinary growth of the scented candle trade.

Smell is atmosphere. Yet it’s the sense least exploited by architecture and design. Apart from ecclesiastical incense, it is dif?cult to think of positive associations for smell in buildings. That terrible swimming-pool thing! Armpit (and worse) in changing rooms. Hotel corridors. Very few restaurants I know attempt to manage smell creatively. Just think of the scope – from comic to tragic – for making imaginative journeys while considering the menu.

Taste and smell alone bear “l’édice du souvenir” (the vast structure of recollection) according to Proust. Here’s a random swing through Remembrance of Things Past as inspiration for the dullards of the smell biz. The lilacs of Tansonville, hawthorn blossom, the smell of a log ?re which reminded the author of the villages around Combray Twigs, leaves, cool forests and petrol (the latter a reminder of car journeys around Balbec). It goes on. Varnish on the staircase, orris root in the closet, the “smell of vetiver in an unfamiliar room”, unbleached calico, his own chamber-pot after eating asparagus, the “glutinous, insipid, indigestible and fruity” smell of a bedspread, and the aroma of the rhino-gomenol decongestant which Mme Verdurin gave off during her musical evenings.

I have got myself into such a mood that I am going to light a True Grace Sacristy candle (inspired by the leather-bound prayer books in Wardour Chapel). And I’m off.

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