Scents of Space: How Fragrance Instantly Uplifts Your Mood and Mindfulness at Home

As the pandemic continues to keep us confined indoors, even the subtlest elements of the home environment take on a new importance. It’s vital to engage all the senses in interior design, but we tend to privilege sight (color, form) and touch (textiles, soft furnishings) while neglecting smell.

Yet, scent’s potential to reduce stress, increase focus, enhance memory, and uplift our mood—benefits we could all use right now—are powerful. A Nobel Prize–winning study found that the average person has around 1,000 olfactory genes in their body, and can recall around 10,000 different smells. Further research suggests that 75% of our daily emotions are influenced by smell, while our mood may improve by 40% after smelling a pleasant fragrance. 

So how to make the most of this extraordinary sensibility? Three experts in the field share the role of scent in their lives, offering ideas for incorporating fragrance into our domestic spaces for a more relaxed and pleasurable everyday.

The Olfactory Designers: AOIRO 

For Shizuko Yoshikuni and Manuel Kuschnig, the Japanese-Austrian couple behind AOIRO, the role of scent in a room isn’t to draw attention to itself, but rather to subtly enhance the overall mood, while gently elevating the other senses. A fragrance should be not so much smelled as felt. "When you come into the space, you [want to] feel it, breathe deep, and experience it without pinpointing the smell," Yoshikuni says. 

From their Berlin studio, AOIRO apply their backgrounds in aromatherapy, anthropology, and design to tailor scent-based experiences and installations for clients ranging from car brands to opera houses. Their own signature scent, Hakudo Rain, distills the essence of the forest floor on Japan’s Awaji Island after a fresh rainfall. 

In their personal lives, scent is a vehicle for presence. The pair draw on simple and mindful rituals, starting the day with a drop of essence in a diffuser to set the mood, and returning to it to reground themselves during breaks as the day unfolds. Yoshikuni compares the effect to the peaceful effect of a gong: "It clears the moment so you can reset, put certain things aside, and experience a different feeling." 

In our distracted and increasingly digital world, physical engagement with scent—the simple act of dripping oil into a cork or ceramic diffuser, or lighting incense—offers a powerful way to bring us back to our bodies, and into the present moment. "You see how it drips, and you can watch the essential oil disappear, then the smell arises when the visual is gone," muses Kuschnig. 

When it comes to scents for relaxation, AOIRO encourages going beyond the classics to explore subtler essences with more complexity. "For winding down, wood essences are really effective," notes Yoshikuni. "We love the Japanese wood hiba, an earthy, powerful, deep wood that’s extremely grounding, and hinoki, which is lighter and more gentle, airy." Frankincense is another favorite—"really purifying and soothing, but with a nice energy and a good tension to it"—as is petitgrain, extracted from the leaves of bitter orange, a vibrant green scent that both calms and uplifts. 

Whichever scent profile resonates, it’s worth knowing how to tell a pure essence from a synthetic one. Good quality essential oils list the country of origin, the botanical name, and the part of the plant it was distilled from, explains Yoshikuni. Price, too, comes into play—pure oils aren’t cheap, but a little goes a long way.

The Architect: Suchi Reddy, Reddymade