The Wanderings Collection

Wanderings is a collection of fragrances, each one a place I have wandered and a memory I have carried home. A life told in scent: a trail of moments, of footsteps treading lightly through a handful of places that never quite left me.

The cold clean air of a Highland evening. Frangipani in the heat of a Seychelles afternoon. My grandmother cutting pomegranate at the table, precise as ever, while I stole the seeds. Each one is held now in fine porcelain, hand-illustrated by Kerry Lemon, and made to be kept.

A white stucco London terrace with black railings on a garden square in autumn, fallen leaves on the pavement.

City Grandeur, London
A path through an English walled garden between deep borders of lavender, verbena and white hydrangeas.

Glorious Gardens, England
A ruined Scottish castle above heather moorland, with a single-track road winding into the hills under a stormy sky.

Highland Retreat, Scotland
A carved sandstone pavilion in India at dusk, jasmine climbing its arches and a single lamp reflected in the water below.

Night Blooms, India
A view through weathered blue wooden shutters onto a Seychelles cove, with palms, granite rocks and a turquoise sea.

Island Breeze, Seychelles
The Bellagio water-taxi jetty on Lake Como, a striped mooring post in the water and mountains across the lake.

Dancing Light, Lake Como

Long before we have words, we have scent. It reaches memory before reason does, and it holds a place more faithfully than any photograph. A fragrance returns us to somewhere, more wholly than memory alone can manage.

Wanderings is built from that. Each fragrance begins as a real place, somewhere we have stood and loved, and the memory of it is given to some of the finest perfumers in the world to be made into scent. Not an idea of a place. The particular one, remembered exactly.

The places are ours. The Seychelles, where I grew up, where the sea at sunset turned a pink I have never found again. My grandparents' home in India, all jasmine and ceremony, and a perfume drawer my grandmother filled over a lifetime. Scotland, which gave us warmth and a welcome we have never forgotten. London, alive and humming, with the green hush of its parks folded inside it. The gardens of Kent and Sussex, where Chris planted roses and lilies and borders of flowers chosen to be breathed in as much as admired. And Lake Como, where we live now, where the light moves on the water beneath a frame of wisteria and asks nothing of us but to look.

These are the places I have wandered. Six of them, gathered across a life and held close ever since, each one waiting to be met again.

We needed an illustrator who could draw memory. Kerry Lemon is one of the most respected illustrators in the United Kingdom, and she rarely takes commissions now. This one, she said, was too good to turn down.

What I gave Kerry was a list of motifs, every one chosen because it held a different part of the essence of a place. A Seychelles tortoise, gentle and in no hurry, from the islands where I grew up. A peacock that once unfurled its whole display in front of me in a garden in India, while I stood there in awe. A fox, for the first urban fox Chris and I ever saw, which stopped us where we stood on a late walk through London. Kerry drew each motif by hand, and I collated her illustrations into a memory collage for every vessel, so that each one gathers a whole place into a single image, her fine black line giving the collection one unmistakable hand while every piece opens onto a world of its own. When she saw what we had made of her beautiful drawings on the finished vessels, she said she was proud. So are we.

Our perfumery houses

Every Told London fragrance is composed with a perfumery house chosen for the place it comes from.

Mastenbroek

City Grandeur, London and Dancing Light, Lake Como. Composed by Ruth and Nic Mastenbroek.

Givaudan

Glorious Gardens, England. Composed by Andrea Montanari.

Sozio

Highland Retreat, Scotland. Composed by Julie Dunkley.

CPL Aromas

Night Blooms, India.

Fragrance Oils

Island Breeze, Seychelles.

We love beautiful things, and we love the world they come from. The two have never seemed separate to us, and so it mattered, from the very beginning, that nothing we made should be used once and discarded.

Each vessel is fine porcelain, carrying its own hand-drawn memory collage, an objet d'art in its own right. Every 300g candle and 200ml diffuser in the collection is refillable, so the porcelain stays and only the fragrance is renewed. The illustration goes on telling its story. And the vessel becomes, over the years, a treasured and permanent thing, kept and perfumed again and again, cherished long after a lesser object would have been forgotten.

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