Le Couvent des Minimes

A perfumery, as told by a botanist monk.

Localisation

Paris

YEAR

Concept 2018

SURFACE

180 m²

MISSION

Boutique concept

APPROACH

NARRATE

The name existed; everything else had to be reinvented. The brand had been bought to become a fine fragrance house, with a new range unrelated to its past. What remained was a monastery in Haute-Provence, the date 1614, and a story no one had yet told.

That story belongs to Louis Feuillée: Minim friar, botanist and cartographer, sent by Louis XIV to South America to chart its coasts and record its plants. A scholar, between the cloister and the open sea.

Hence the concept: not an apothecary, not a chapel, but a scholar’s study. A scriptorium, where perfume comes as much from learning as from plants.

Versailles parquet is turned onto the ceiling. Bookcases become fragrance displays, secretaire desks hide drawers, and essences sit under glass domes beside old botanical engravings. A fragrance is found by leafing through folios, and a bottle chosen like a leather-bound book. Each way of testing was designed together with the object that holds it.

The concept carries across formats: wall displays for department stores, testing trays for shop counters. The same vocabulary, at another scale.

The whole is eclectic but ordered, full of images yet quiet: a sober cabinet of curiosities.