Nysæ
olfactory scenographies and scent objects

Repose: How would you describe what you do?

Marion: It is simply about proposing a ritual, a gesture, and diffusing in a slightly unconventional way. We create the narratives and the rituals that diffuse scents. The perfume already exists, the brand already has its scent. What we build is the concept around how to make people experience it, often without realizing where it is coming from. The material can be anything that has a smell: an essential oil, a concentrated juice from a chef's kitchen, incense, a citrus peel. What matters is the story behind the smell and the way it is diffused.

Our three pillars are garden, perfumery and kitchen. Every time we need a mold or a tool, we go to the kitchen first, or to perfumery supplies. It is not only metaphorical. It is very concrete.

Repose: What is your background and how did the studio come together?

Marion: I am an interior architect and designer. I did a master's in Paris. Charles studied at the École du Paysage de Versailles, a program called Création de jardin dans le paysage. He could have worked in a design office drawing garden plans, but that was never his personality. He left and spent years doing actual gardening.

We met at Domaine du Rayol near Toulon, which is an extraordinary garden. At the time I no longer wanted to work in interior architecture. I was training in plant propagation, garden design and herbalism, studying medicinal plants. When we met, we also decided to work together. I had all the skills to draw the plans. What I needed was training in plants, soil and climate. Charles already had all of that.

We started a small landscape design bureau and took on projects near Saint-Tropez and in Brittany. But very quickly I realized I was living the same experience I had left: clients I could not work with. So we decided to stop realizing projects for other people and start creating objects that could live in gardens.

Repose: What was the turning point?

Marion: The residency at Villa Arson was the first time we could do exactly what we wanted, and we made a large stone piece that became the starting point for everything that followed. A garden shower, a fountain. That was where we decided that if this piece lives outside, it has to tell a story. And that was where we wanted to integrate scent in a very visible way, more than in the previous collection.

Water helps people understand that a fluid is there and that it can carry a fragrance. The first piece had a ritual attached to it: small stones that you add to the water. That became my small laboratory within the studio. I have worked on many different recipes since then, things that make the water opaque, things that keep it transparent. That is my part within the duo with Charles.

Repose: Why does scent matter so much in the practice?

Marion: When you enter a garden with your eyes closed, you are not distracted by beautiful flowers, by colors, by the size of the trees. All of that can actually cancel out what you are able to smell. But eyes closed, every other sense is fully awake. You add sight later, which is in the end the easiest sense. It gives the whole experience a multisensory dimension.

Repose: What do you want people to carry with them after an experience with you?

Marion: You used the word carry, and that is exactly it. When you talk about perfume, you talk about sillage, about what you can take away with you.

What we transmit intrinsically is what you feel especially early in the morning or in the evening, in those slightly out-of-step moments when the crowd is not there. You feel a kind of fullness. You consider it a refuge. You feel calm. And when you talk about it, even without intending to, you provoke that letting go. People have told us: we switched off our brains during your lunch. It did us as much good as a walk in a garden. We do not want to do more than that.

But it is never a direct message. It is never activism. It is always very tied to nature, climate, the environment, and gardens. For the yellow lunch we talked about heat waves, about why we chose that color, or at another dinner we talked about roots, about underground life, about fungi, about preserving the environment. The message is there, but it arrives gently.

Repose: What inspires you most?

Marion: Natural phenomena. A kind of biomimicry, but it is very simple: we look at what happens in nature and ask how we can diffuse a scent by mimicking it. Morning in cold weather. Right now the mornings are cold, and there is a splendid mist over the meadows. Things that dissolve in the sun. Things that are released by heat. These are all natural diffusion systems, and they inspire us constantly.

And the garden itself. Charles has always been deeply connected to it. Working in the garden makes the inspiration flow much more naturally. To be aligned with what we do.

Photography: Claudia Goletto.

Repose Archive is a creative direction journal documenting processes and projects across art, design, architecture, and hospitality.