The Architects Club
Arquiste (2014)

Loved the opening and middle notes of the fragrance. Unfortunately the drydown was way too sweet for me. Like vanilla cotton candy or something.

In 1910, the architect Adolf Loos gave a lecture entitled Ornament and Crime.
It wasn't a condemnation of jewel thieves but an attack on the naturalistic flourishes of Art Nouveau buildings.

Loos thought 'the elimination of ornament from useful objects' was the way to go, and this lead to the Form Follows Function school - which praised grain elevators and similar industrial buildings for their straightforward design.

Having lived in New York, Yann Vasnier must have been aware of modern architecture, and was maybe influenced by it, for in The Architects Club - as with the modern tower block - form matches function.

There is no ornamentation, the perfume is a collection of plain surfaces; woody-oily, slightly powdery, bitter-sweet. Not so much glass and steel, or even concrete, but a nuanced woody-plastic that reminds me of Formica - that plasticky laminate of cloth and resin.

It's a minimal, dry-sweet woody scent that doesn't lean on cedar. Instead it uses gaiac & musk, and is all the better for it. It wouldn't surprise me if Richard Rogers wore this.

I love this one. Smoky vanilla and woods, with clove creeping in later. More woody than gourmand and completely unisex to my nose.

I cannot believe that this scent is not getting more love. I purchased it a few months ago from Scentbird and loved it so much I had to buy a full bottle. This is a lovely vanilla scent but not a gourmand warm, cozy vanilla. Instead the vanilla is present but feels fresh. It lasts on me a long time and has become my favorite scent of late. It is one of those scents that I have to stop and smell my wrists every so often. Definitely a keeper for me.

Smells a bit like old paper, not in a good way.

This was bugging me before I figured it out - it smells a lot like a more, I want to say, "chemical" Tocade, a little less floral and with heavier doses of heliotropin and whatever else tends to supplement synthetic vanilla. Overall I find it quite a bit more annoying than real Tocade, vintage bottles of which can be found on Ebay for about a tenth of the price of this one.