The Room 1015 Discovery Set is the Paris house's own boxed sampler — ten 2.5 ml sprays covering the full range, which for a brand this varied is the only sensible way in.
What it smells like
Ten quite different things, which is rather the point. The box holds Kokoa Bang, Wasabi Klub, Poppy Riot, Wavechild, Love-O-Matic, Jasmine Freak, Cherry Punk, Sonic Flower, Sweet Leaf and Purple Mantra.
Cherry Punk is the house signature and the one most people arrive for: a leather fragrance that opens on cherry and saffron and dries down animalic and dark. Wavechild goes the opposite way — mandarin, watermelon and dry coconut over salty ambergris, built for heat. Love-O-Matic is the clean one, a fruity musk constructed around the idea of a laundromat, and the most broadly likeable thing here.
Wasabi Klub is the sharpest: yuzu and lime over genuine wasabi and Sichuan pepper, dry and savoury. Sweet Leaf is green and herbal, built on cannabis, eucalyptus and grapefruit. Purple Mantra is the calm one, lavender and clary sage over incense and myrrh. Jasmine Freak is a tropical white floral of mango and tuberose, and Poppy Riot is sweet and smoky, all dried plum, saffron, milk and tobacco.
Two of the ten — Kokoa Bang and Sonic Flower — are not currently stocked as full bottles at Redolia, so the set is also the only way to try them here.
Who it's for
Anyone considering a full bottle and sensibly unwilling to commit without trying. At 2.5 ml each these vials hold enough for several complete wearings, which is what you actually need with this house — several of these fragrances change substantially between the opening and the drydown, and Cherry Punk in particular is a different proposition at four hours than at four minutes.
It is also a reasonable gift for someone whose taste you do not know precisely, since the range spans citrus, leather, floral, green and gourmand.
The practical approach: one per day across a couple of weeks, sprayed on skin rather than card, with a note of which ones you are still thinking about that evening. The vials are sprays, so they apply the way a full bottle will.
How it sits in the line
Room 1015 was founded in Paris in 2015 by Michael Partouche — Dr. Mike — a trained pharmacist who spent five years touring with his band in London before concluding that fragrance was where chemistry and music met. The house is named after room 1015 of the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Strip, the "Riot House", and calls what it does olfactory counterculture.
What makes the discovery set genuinely useful here, rather than a token gesture, is that this house has no signature accord. Most brands you can learn from one bottle; Room 1015 you cannot. The line is composed by four different perfumers — Jérôme di Marino, Jérôme Epinette and Serge de Oliveira among them — and briefed from references as far apart as London punk, Rishikesh in 1968, Huntington Beach and a laundromat.
The bottles themselves are worth a word: heavy coloured glass sized for the palm, under a faceted cap cut like a dark gem, with the colour changing to match the juice. Black caps mark the eaux de parfum and silver the extraits.
The full note breakdown is on the Room 1015 Discovery Set product page, the rest of the house is in the Room 1015 collection, and you can find comparable scents under Room 1015. 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.