Buildings have their own smell. Have you ever noticed it? With the change of weather, buildings exhale their age, materials, and history.
First, homes definitely hold their owners’ scents. You could lead me blindfolded into a home, and I’d tell you in a second if the occupant was a vegetarian or had pets. (Honestly, vegetarians smell a little mustier than meat eaters.) I have a housesitter, a terrific guy, and when I handed over my keys, I wondered if he’d feel comfortable in my home surrounded by my odor: two cats, flowers on the mantel, old furniture, a ripe cantaloupe in the refrigerator. I changed the sheets and gave the mattress a few spritzes of Santa Maria Novella cologne.
The Parisian apartment I’m staying in has its smells, too. Coming up the stairwell, I smell the old wood that makes the frame of this 1930s building. On the wool carpet running up the stairs, fastened by brass rods to each step, hangs traces of the occupants who climbed it with arms full of groceries or terriers or rain-heavy wool coats over the past few decades. The woman whose apartment I’m staying at used to smoke, and the vaguest — really, just a bare hint — of tobacco clings to the walls. Lucky for me, she’s also a perfume lover. Sotto voce fragrance murmurs in the background.
On the street, buildings breathe a dirty-stony scent in August’s muggy air. Cafés exude coffee and floor cleaner. Courtyards right now are thick with the indolic, sweet fragrance of glorybower trees. And, of course, diesel fumes infuse the streets, competing with the occasional pocket of urine.
A building doesn’t have to smell “good” to be good. It’s life that I like to smell. I love imagining the stories that have chased and teased and counter-chased through the years on every stretch of hallway or sidewalk I pass. Scent has a way of sticking around when sound and sight have long gone.
What about you? How do you feel about strange and even unsettling smells when you travel?
Note: top image is Staircase [cropped] via Son of Groucho at flickr; some rights reserved.
I went to Paris in’94, ’96, ’98, 2000 and ’01 for a total of almost 11 weeks. It never ceased to amaze me that in a city of “2 million” people there were only “2 toilets”. (As the years went by, it improved somewhat and there even seemed to be fewer smokers!) Sacre Coeur and the Left Bank across from the Trocadero were soaked in urine. I still remember the exact places where I saw men going in public. Culture shock!
The dept. stores’ perfume departments of course were cacophony of scents.
The first blotter I was handed by a S/A was Mouchoir de Monsieur and I remember how impressed I was by that fragrance’s refinement.
Wow, it sounds like you had some memorable visits! Especially odor-wise. Cigarette smoke isn’t an issue in restaurants anymore, and I’m not sure there’s more urine scent here than in any big city. It’s still a challenge to find a public toilet, though.
Thanks for making time on your vacation to write about it, Angela! I’m very much enjoying your observations and reflections. Please have a great time and also let us know if you bring back any new perfumes!
You’re welcome, of course! So far, I’ve sampled Grandiflora Queen of the Night and really liked it, as well as the Pierre Bourdon Magnolia scent (can’t remember the exact name).
Oh, I’m really curious about Queen of the Night! I liked Grandiflora Sandrine very much, and I’m a big Duchaufour fan. He hasn’t done as many florals as he has other styles, and I love his take on tuberose in L’AP Nuit de Tubereuse. Hence, I’m very much looking forward to see how he does Selenicereus grandiflorus. I hope you review it!
I think I will review it. It’s not my usual favorite type of fragrance, but I really enjoyed it the time I wore it!
I am vegetarian..I don’t think I smell musty! The nerve..
Eeek! Another vegetarian here. I don’t think that I smell more (or less) like mold, mildew, damp, decay, or staleness (“musty” encompasses those things) than meat eaters.
See the comment below! Good musty. Not decay musty.
🙂
Not bad musty! Good musty. Like a picked flower.
<3
I thought of a better comparison. You know that musty hit you get off a fresh glass of a dry, elegant Burgundy wine? Like that.
One of the buildings my company ised to occupy had what amounted to a greenhouse lobby. To say it was a pleasure passing through on the way up to sterile cubicle farms is an understatement. Too bad it got torn down.
On house smells — my brother has 3 dogs (all King Charles Cavalier) that are kept very clean; however, coming from a no pets household for 3 decades, even the cleanest dog smells like … dog.
What sems to smell the same regardless of geographic location is the stale cigarette food money perfume old pleather scent of taxis.
Thanks for sharing your smell diary.
Very apt description of taxi aroma!
I agree!
I love these descriptions! Too bad about the greenhouse. Dog smell is dog smell, but I used to love the corn chips-like smell of my old dog Tex.
I am at turns envious of and horrified by the acuity of your sense of smell, Angela. Years of allergies and chemical sensitivities have dulled mine. My choice would be somewhere between what we each have, I think (if you’re listening, Universe).
Love your vacation series, thanks for the insights.
I don’t think I have a very keen sense of smell, really, but I do enjoy trying to suss out scents. Fortunately, I don’t usually suffer allergies, and that really helps.
I’ve been to Paris several times and – shockingly – never liked it! Until I went this summer, when it had mysteriously grown on me. I don’t like the wide avenues and the sparsely wooded parks and the exposed stone monuments… But I like the busy neighbourhoods and the long lines out the doors of certain boulangeries and the strange houses and the old churches tucked into modern areas! I think it smells like hot pavement, car exhaust, sour milk and urine, like most large cities, but there’s a certain something that makes it uniquely Paris.
I don’t know what big cities where I live smell like though! I can’t recall ever noticing a Stockholm scent. Maybe I’ve grown used to it.
I appreciate your honesty about Paris, and I really like your descriptions of what you like in the city. I love it when I see the more “personal” part of a Parisian home, even when it’s just a glance at a garden or courtyard. Next week I’m hoping to walk along the Petite Ceinture, and I’m hoping to see the backsides of more buildings.
Popping in to say I am loving this series! I’m really looking forward to today’s installment, it feels like I’m right there with you – such evocative writing.
I’m so glad you’re enjoying them! Thank you!
It is marvelous how every building has a unique scent. I think lovingly of my grandparents’ home and its smell. My grandfather was a carpenter and builder. When he retired, he built a new home with a wood shop in his basement. The sweet smell of planks, sawdust, glue, finishing oils, and lacquers delicately permeated everything. Upstairs, my neat as a pin Danish grandma loved her home’s shiny custom woodwork. There was a scented patina of waxy polish on surfaces and in the air. She baked bread and pies that created wonderful smells. My grandparents loved to travel and collected wood carvings from the Pacific islands and Asia. Some of them were exotically fragranced. It was heavenly.
I am grateful I was able to travel to Paris before-children and with-children, on trips a decade apart. Both times I felt a bit overcome by the less-pleasant big city smells, but the underlying odor of old stones, the Seine, and the ancient dust of humanity was unmistakable, and felt almost sacred. From the before-children trip I remember more of the smells of trains and subway stations and museums, the wafting scents of pastis and wine and cigarettes. With-children there were more pastries, chocolate and sweets, grassy parks, and long walks in the sun.
Thank you, Angela, for the reminder to remember. 🙂
Oh, I love your scent description of your grandparents’ house. It sounds so comforting and so particular to them. I also love how you describe the smell of Paris’s stone buildings as almost “sacred.” I understand that.
Hear hear.
Thank you for this wonderful series, Angela! I feel like I’m right there, sniffing alongside you. I’m a country mouse who doesn’t much care for cities, but I’ve always truly loved Paris. And for me, the memories of past visits come flooding back any time I’m walking down a street a few hours after a rain shower and someone nearby is smoking. Instant limbic system tickle, that.
I’ve always noticed the smells of the houses I’ve lived in, and how each house, apartment, what have you has its own native smell that’s noticeable when I first move in, gradually is subsumed into the various scents of my household’s life, and then mysteriously re-emerges when I move out. As soon as the boxes are packed and the furniture cleared away, there’s the original smell of the house again, some mysterious and complex chord made up of the thousand smells of its past inhabitants and past lives. I like to think I’m adding a note, in passing, but whether that note is sautéed garlic or Aprés l’Ondée, only the future tenants could say!
Nice observation! I think a house’s smells kick up a notch at the turning of the seasons, too, as the heat draws them out or cold isolates some of them.
Once I lived in an apartment whose former tenant smoked cigarillos. You can imagine what that place smelled like. (He also left behind a sheaf of head x-rays showing that he had a nail embedded at the base of his skull.)
I love the smell of my dogs and the dusty old stone smells of France. Both precious in their own way.
Stone walls smell SO good. I’ve just noticed that.