HYACINTH HOUSE

~ Est. 2026, St Louis USA ~

Hyacinthus was the dearest of Apollo's lovers, and so an Apollonian ~ a student of dreams, music, and healing. The Hyacinth House is a perfume house ~ and more, a dream house in pursuit of beauty. A modern beauty of tension between the classical and contemporary, dissonance and consonance, nature and artifice.

~

Once upon a time there was an artist. He split his activity between writing beautiful music and evocative poetry, often wondering why he couldn’t pick one. He’d sometimes muse over this split, asking, What do these things have in common? The answer, he supposed, must be in the art itself. Evocation, suggestion, a feel for Apolline impressionism was evident. His goal from the beginning was to build a permanent site for music, a dream house, an artist’s chapel. Time passed, children came and grew, reality asserted itself. As if channeling the cosmos, the music came through him and evanesced into the ephemeral air. But the material columns of the dream house remained painfully virtual.

One late spring, his girlfriend’s birthday was fast approaching, and as he was a poor artist, he thought, Perhaps I should make her something thoughtful. But what? She liked fragrance, and she had recently visited a perfume museum in Venice, so The Artist thought, Maybe I can try my hand at perfumes? I’m an artist after all, how hard could it be? And so deep down the research rabbithole he descended, spending what little resources he had sniffing various essential oils, staying up late conceptualizing fragrance-images, and generally excited to immerse into a new medium. The joy of discovery, is there anything more inspiring for an artist?

By the end of the month he had produced six fragrance sketches, all loosely relevant to the poetry he had written his lover over the years. He called the first Pining For You ~ pines and elegant woods of course; Cave of Domestic Bliss ~ the proverbial intimate cave they romanticized; Hyacinth House ~ the floral Ozarkian fields under their planted Wisteria; Satyr Forest ~ a nod to their naughty, wild eros; Narcisse Echo ~ extension of their collaborative music performances on the myth; Silenus ~ the drunk yet mysteriously wise quality she loved in The Artist so much.

And yet, The Artist grew a love for the art of perfume on its own terms, leaning into its Proustian aspect. He realized he appreciated in perfume the same art of evocation in his music and poetry. What scents were appealing to him, the artist then asked? He thought of his youthful wandering in the high riparian desert, a man now in search of the wild junipers and mesquite groves of his boyish youth, the lost gardens and peach orchards of utopian Arcosanti. He reconsidered his early days as a farmer/gardener, working in the fields with so many disparate plants, rediscovering an enthusiasm for botany. The artistic curiosity in him wondered about the unexplored perception and consciousness associated with scent, and the newness of this medium. A student of the “third ear” in music, he wondered if there could be a ‘third nose’ in perfume. He compared perfume and music, wondering about the way perfume houses list notes — Isn’t this strange, he thought, akin to listening to a music composition and reducing it to sets of notes? Isn’t it about the relations between notes and how they suggest something entirely new? New feelings? New associations with memories? He wondered about the sensuous play on neurological phenomena, how scent affects feeling. The neuro-aesthetic research was very interesting: Lavender is documented to reduce stress; Bergamot has anti-depressant qualities; Hedione activates the hypothalumus, neurological center for sex. Etc. The Artist wondered if the recent trend in perfumes post-pandemic ~ and modernity more generally ~ is a subconscious way of addressing modern anxieties. His relationship to "healing" was always complicated, finding it an annoying buzzword, while also containing a kernel of truth. And wasn’t Apollo also the god of healing, in addition to music and poetry? The Artist’s love of the botanical world inspired him to make complex compositions, overfull, lush with greenery. The Artist loved the chemical world too, the way nature is isolated and resynthesized in the image of humanity. At the base of his fragrances were stalwart trees, dreamy mosses, and deep roots, a baseline ostinato over which every other voice freely improvises. He thought the heart should radiate exotic, narcotic, often artificial flowers after Baudelaire, and the higher spirits and dulcet tones should evanesce into clear air.

But wasn’t this all getting away from The Artist’s life-goals to build a kind of dream house, his own artist’s chapel devoted to music? Could this new fragrance endeavor be folded into the vision? Beyond ‘could’, should it? And if so, how? Would the painterly speaker panels the artist made be fragrance-loaded, using acoustic vibration to diffuse scent? Would this hypothetical ‘dream house’ become more of a dynamic mixed-media total work of art, instead of a site for music specifically? Could selling the perfumes be a means of cultivating the resources to ultimately build this abstract, ambitious vision? The Artist’s studio was now filled with bottles and little perfume lid sculptures implementing imagery from his dream-archive ~ vesicas with unique harmonic proportions, models of the inner ear, hexasphericons and other geometrical curiosities. Perhaps The Artist should sell these perfumes as the rarified artworks they are?

~ And look at those doric columns in the Hyacinth’s H ~
The two stalwart I’s, between which a third thing is evoked.
The trellis upon which grows a dreamy botanical art.

I*I

~ Bret Schneider
Fall 2026