Maison Buongiorno

01 · The Office · 7:00 AM

Mattina

The scent of starting the day with intention

My first job was in a cold Boston office. I arrived early, stayed late, and survived almost entirely on Starbucks and beef jerky — I wish I were kidding. Since then, my relationship with work has changed. It has deepened, broadened, and become something closer to a calling — the stewardship of the world I will one day leave behind. There is no more important way to begin a working day than with confidence and a quiet sense of purpose. Magnolia, orange blossom, and a long dry base of iris. The kind of scent that stays with you through your most important meetings and reminds you, softly, why you're there.

The Notes

04 · First Date · 8:00 PM

Sentire

A signal that you have not just money, but taste

It has been some time since I've been on a first date — but if I went on one tomorrow, I would carry a Bottega Veneta wallet. Not because it communicates wealth exactly, but because it communicates something more considered than that: taste. The history of perfume began in the same place. In Grasse, in the 16th century, glovemakers began scenting their leather with flowers — tuberose above all — because bathing was, in the age of plague, a genuinely dangerous affair. Perfume was the solution. This scent returns to that original idea: leather and a white flower, very close to the skin. And yes — there is a hidden surprise.

The Notes

05 · Home · 10:00 PM

Abbraccio

The doorway to the most special relationship you will ever have

Fathers were not always present for the very first moments of a child's life. But when you are — when that door opens and they place this small, astonishing person in your arms for the first time — nothing in your life has prepared you for it. It is Bocelli's L'incontro made flesh: every lyric you thought you understood, suddenly manifesting into reality. That first hug is a doorway. What is on the other side of it is the most special relationship you will ever have. I have always believed the perfect version of that moment would carry, somewhere in it, the onaona scent of sandalwood and a fresh plumeria lei.

The Notes

03 · The Coast · 4:00 PM

Mare

The moment every cell in your body dissolves into the living, breathing ocean

I grew up in Waikiki surrounded by two things: flowers and the sea. Is there anything more sublime than wearing a fresh lei of jasmine pikake on the sand? But the sea I grew up next to was easy to love. After years in San Francisco, I discovered a different kind of sea — cold, dark, a little funky. A sea that few people dare plunge into — but the brave ones who do are rewarded by a divine moment where every thought and worry dissolves into something larger and more mysterious than yourself. You become something simpler, something that belongs to the water. This scent lives in that moment.

The Notes

02 · At Home · 1:00 PM

Giardino

The delicate, unforgettable scent of Paris in April

When I think of home, I think of a garden. When I think of a garden, I cannot help but think of Paris in April — the Tuileries at dusk, the Jardin du Luxembourg on a Tuesday morning, Parc Monceau after rain, the courtyard at Le Bristol. In these gardens I see tulips and daffodils. But what I smell is something else entirely: cold mint, wet stone, the particular green of broken stems, and rising above all of it — faint, almost imagined — the first muguet of spring. There is nothing quite like it on earth.

The Notes