HYACINTH HOUSE

Welcome to the Hyacinth House

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.

~

My personal inspiration for creating perfumes was seeking a fragrance that captured my youthful wandering in the high riparian desert, a man in search of the wild junipers of his boyish youth, the lost gardens and peach orchards of utopian Arcosanti. Scent is the clearest neurological path to memory, and there's always a Proustian aspect to perfume, an art of evocation and reverie. As an artist exploring reverie in music and poetry, it was perhaps only a matter of time before I was taken with the art of perfume. But this interest is less about perfume per se, and much more about the perception and consciousness associated with scent. I list some of my notes as references, but isn’t it about the relations of the notes that creates something unique? Of what use would it be to describe a music composition by the notes it uses?! As a music composer, I recognized that I love perfumes for similar reasons to why I love music ~ fragrances evoke complex internal feelings and images, as sensual as they are virtual. I hope that one day scent and music will be integrated into a literal house, an enduring immersive art work in homage to beauty.

The character of Hyacinth House fragrances are earthly and diffuse. The first conception ~ Rose of Zarathustra ~ a nod to Nietzsche's joyful sage of Earthly exuberance, wandering under clear, open skies in the mountains, amongst thorny roses under Mediterranean cypresses. And yet, this Hyacinth House is surrounded by the animalic wilderness of the Satyr's forest; caves artfully concealed under ancient woods where Narcissus finds his lover Echo; expansive pastoral lawns of impressionist diffusion; and the wild hills of drunken Silenus. Hyacinth House is not all poetic evocation, it is also obdurately physical, sensuous, and plays on neurological phenomena into how scent affects feeling. Lavender is documented to reduce stress; Bergamot has anti-depressant qualities; Hedione activates the hypothalumus, neurological center for sex. Etc. One could argue that the recent trend in perfumes postpandemic ~ and modernity more generally ~ is a subconscious way of addressing modern anxieties. That is, scent is an artful aspect of healing. While "healing" may be an annoying buzzword, there is a kernel of truth to the need to “heal thyself”, and which takes on a specific character in our modern world.

While Hyacinth House fragrances take inspiration from historical references, they are contemporary interpretations utilizing new and exciting olfactory materials. Likewise, Hyacinth House fragrances are an artistic resynthesis of nature, with materials sourced from eg the finest essential oils available, crafted in small batches, in~my~house, with lids I design and create myself. The art of perfume not as "natural", but nature resynthesized in the complex image of humanity. Hyacinth House pursues a lush, opulent, and romantic-modern feeling, with a plentiful dose of dissonance in the olfactory harmonies. The fragrances are full-bodied, even overfull. At the base of every Hyacinth House fragrance are stalwart trees, dreamy mosses, and deep roots, a baseline ostinato over which every other voice freely improvises. Hyacinth House's heart radiates exotic, narcotic flowers after Baudelaire, and the higher spirits and dulcet tones evanesce into clear air. All to say that Hyacinth House perfumes are not easily defined by "top-mid-base" distinctions ~ they are environments of their own. The entire body of work is converging toward something rare, but emergent in perfumery: a controlled ecosystem model where each fragrance represents a different phase of matter: air, water, soil, decay, and abstraction. As much temporal as botanical. Hyacinth House is more about exploring the consciousness around what it feels like, subjectively, and not necessarily about the thing itself. As in the music, Hyacinth House is concerned with exploring the relations between materials, and orchestrating the conditions of experience.

~ Look at the columns in the Hyacinth’s H ~
The two Doric I’s, between which a third thing is evoked.
The trellis upon which grows my evocative botanical art.

I*I

~ Bret Schneider
Spring 2026