Maison Buongiorno

50ML

MATTINA

For the new job, the new title, the morning that changes everything.

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 maison recommends wearing it an hour before you walk in as the new person — the one who belongs there.

SENTIRE

For the first date — the one you actually care about.

That first smell of someone is everything. Whatever picture you'd built of the great love you're meant to end up with — mine was an island surfer girl who loved dim sum on Sundays — it all dissolves in that first breath. And for me there is nothing more seductive than a night-blooming tuberose: a white flower still on the vine, opening after dark, a scent that has enchanted lovers for centuries even when romantic love was mostly forbidden. Green tomato vine keeps it magnetic and a little heady — impossible to quite place. What follows is anyone's guess.

The maison recommends wearing it an hour before something that might change your life.

GIARDINO

For the keys in the door, the unpacked boxes, the first morning in a place that's yours.

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 maison recommends it for the first weekend you wake somewhere that's finally home.

MARE

For the honeymoon, the sabbatical, the year you finally took for yourself.

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 maison recommends packing it for the trip you almost didn't take, and wearing it the second your feet leave the dock.

ABBRACCIO

For the door that opens, the small astonishing person, the moment nothing has prepared you for.

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 maison recommends wearing it the day you meet someone you'll be holding for the next forty years.