Hollyrose is Room 1015's leather rose, composed by Jérôme Epinette and built around the muses of 1970s Sunset Boulevard, and it is an amber-floral in which rose and leather are so evenly matched that which one you notice first depends on your own nose.
What it smells like
Black currant and black pepper open it. The blackcurrant is tart and faintly sulphurous in the way real cassis is, and the pepper is dry and sharp. It is a bracing opening rather than a pretty one, and it sets expectations correctly.
The heart is rose oil and orchid. The rose is dark and jammy rather than fresh or dewy, and the orchid lends a smooth, slightly synthetic, lipstick-like quality that suits the fragrance's Hollywood brief exactly.
Underneath sits leather and patchouli — animalic, earthy, and unhurried. Community accords rank rose and leather almost level at the top, then fruity, animalic and floral. In practice it wears as a single sustained accord rather than as a progression: rose-and-leather, for hours.
Who it's for
For anyone who likes rose but has tired of rose fragrances that apologise for themselves. This one is dark, faintly dirty, and makes no attempt at prettiness.
If you already wear leather roses the territory will be familiar immediately. If the only roses you know are the fresh, dewy, spring-garden kind, this will be a considerable adjustment — try before buying. Within the house it is structurally closest to Cherry Punk, swapping the cherry for a rose.
Performance: strong projection in the opening hours and long wear, in line with the rest of the house's darker work.
Cold weather, evenings, dates and occasions with some weight to them. It is not an everyday or office fragrance — it is too assertive for either, and that is the point.
How it sits in the line
Room 1015 is a Paris house founded in 2015 by Michael Partouche, named after room 1015 of the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Strip. Each fragrance begins from a cultural reference, and Hollyrose's is the 1970s Sunset Boulevard scene — the women who moved through it, Anita Pallenberg and Bebe Buell and Pamela Des Barres among them.
That brief explains the fragrance better than a note list does. It is not a rose for a garden; it is a rose worn in a hotel corridor at four in the morning, which is why the leather and the blackcurrant matter as much as the flower.
At 2017 it is one of the older fragrances in the line and among the house's more divisive, with a rating below those of Cherry Punk and Love-O-Matic. That split is about the animalic facet rather than about quality — people either want that in a rose or they very much do not.
The full note breakdown is on the Room 1015 Hollyrose Eau de Parfum product page, the rest of the house is in the Room 1015 collection, and you can find comparable scents under Amber Floral. It is also on the scent bar at our Somerville boutique — worth trying on skin before you commit, because this is a house whose fragrances change a good deal between the first spray and the drydown.