Maison de L’Asie is a niche Singapore-founded luxury fragrance house that uses storytelling to create uniquely Asian scents.

Brand Snapshot

More due to a lack of craft than content, Asia is not known as a centre of fragrance. And yet, as a region, it is often best explained in multi-sensorial terms. Sights, tastes, touch - and, of course, smells abound.

Maison de L’Asie combines those relatable Asian scents with French production techniques. In the same way herbal tea came to put emotional benefit over ingredients, Maison de l’Asie is hoping to do the same with story. In other words: to appreciate the fragrance requires an appreciation of the narrative. The discernment required is what gives the perfumes a complexity that not everyone will want, or be able to, decode. The brand’s “scene-scents” are transformative whiffs that challenge a category where the cost of entry has become low, and where the “auteur” (read: celeb) can be more important than the smell itself. Signalling place as an olfactory reaction takes careful selection and deep consideration, and Elizabeth Liau’s Chapter collections, such as Les Nuits de Bali, Nanyang, Bangkok 9/9, tend to deliver. Like stories, the scents unfold. The perfumes become her way of sharing something more raw and fundamental, in the same way a canvas or piano might for others. Homecoming, loss, time’s passage are universal themes brought to life with Asian aromas. The place itself is not the point, simply the setting. In some ways: more intimate = rarer = more luxurious.

The label designs, with the stories’ corresponding delicate line sketches, do cue a certain Orientalism, which is somehow diluted in the overtly Francophone name. However, such a linguistic heuristic may work to smoothen the consideration journey for global luxury buyers and also does imply the benefit of a borrowed tradition. With sights set on New York, London and Paris, Maison de L’Asie could become the next Asian luxury fragrance powerhouse.