Roses: A Candle That Ties Two Homes Together

Some scents are just scents. This one is a place, a season, and a memory, and it's probably the most personal candle we've made.

Growing up with the smell of roses

I grew up in Cyprus, where summers were long and slow. Life on the island ran at a gentler pace, meals that lasted hours, afternoons that went nowhere in particular (not much of a choice as anywhere other than in front of the A/C was not survivable), the kind of slow living people now write books about and we simply called being at home.

One of the smells I remember most is mahalepi. It's a pale, rose-scented pudding, cool from the fridge, made with rose water and eaten on hot afternoons when it was too warm to do much else. My yiayia and pappou made it the traditional way, and the smell of it in their kitchen, soft roses, cold and sweet, is one of the things that takes me straight back the moment I catch it. The taste is delicate, sweet and floral and it was always gone quite a bit quicker than I care to admit. Rose, for me, has never been perfume. It's been mahalepi at yiayia's table, and home.

Roses, closer to home

Years later, I live and make things in England, in the Sussex Downs. And roses turn out to be everywhere here too, just differently. In the great gardens and national parks, in climbing roses over village doorways, in ordinary back gardens where someone's spent years getting them right. An English rose garden in June is one of the glories of this country, all scent and colour and the hum of bees, and it's a completely different world to a Cypriot summer while somehow smelling of the same flower.

That's the idea behind this candle. Rose is a flower that belongs to both my homes, the island I grew up on and the country I've built a life in, and Roses is our attempt to hold both of them in one scent.

What the candle smells like

This is a rose scent for people who think they don't like rose, including myself! It opens green and fresh, more leaf and stem than flower, the smell of a rose still on the bush rather than one that's been bottled. The rose itself comes through full and soft in the heart, generous but never heavy, with a gentle woodiness underneath that keeps it grounded. It's floral without being too sweet, and it feels like a garden rather than a perfume counter.

We pour it, as we do everything, by hand in small batches using natural wax, with a fragrance developed slowly so it releases evenly and lasts from the first burn to the last.

Two homes in one scent

We make candles because we love making things well, with good materials and no shortcuts, the same way we approach the furniture and everything else that comes out of the workshop. Most of our scents start with a place or a feeling we want to capture. This one started with me, with yiayia's kitchen, and with two homes a couple of thousand miles apart that both smell, in their own way, of roses.

If you've ever had a scent take you somewhere instantly, you'll understand the thinking behind this one. Roses is Cyprus and England in the same candle, and it's as close to our heart as anything we've poured.

It joins our small range alongside candles like Wild Thyme and Fig Tree, each hand-poured in small batches and made to be kept.

For shops, brands and something of your own

Alongside our own scents, we work with a small number of shops and brands on private label and white label candles, and on custom fragrances developed from an idea, a memory, or a place that is personal to you. If you've got a scent story of your own you'd like to tell, get in touch.

Roses is released in the coming days.