Room 1015 Hollyrose Eau de Parfum

What it smells like

Hollyrose is a rose fragrance with leather underneath it, and the two are so evenly matched that which one you notice first depends mostly on your own nose.

Black currant and black pepper open it — the blackcurrant tart and faintly sulphurous in the way real cassis is, the pepper dry and sharp. It is a bracing opening rather than a pretty one.

The heart is rose oil and orchid. The rose is dark and jammy rather than fresh, and the orchid gives it a slightly synthetic, lipstick-like smoothness that suits the fragrance's 1970s Hollywood brief — the house built it around the muses of Sunset Boulevard.

The base is leather and patchouli, animalic and earthy. Community accords rank rose and leather almost level at the top, then fruity, animalic and floral. It wears as a single accord rather than as a progression: rose-and-leather, for hours.

Who made it

Composed by Jérôme Epinette, a French perfumer at Robertet in New York who trained at the Grasse Institute of Perfumery after a biochemistry degree in Dijon. He is best known for his long collaboration with Ben Gorham at Byredo, where he composed most of the line. His Room 1015 work is darker and more textural than that, reaching for leather and patchouli where Byredo reaches for clarity.

You can see the other fragrances he composed for the house, and for others, on the Jérôme Epinette collection page.

Who it's for

For anyone who likes rose but is tired of rose fragrances that apologise for themselves. This one is dark, a little dirty, and makes no attempt to be pretty.

If you already wear leather roses you will recognise the territory immediately; if the only roses you know are the fresh dewy kind, this will be a considerable shift. Within the house it is closest to Cherry Punk in structure, trading the cherry for a rose.

Unisex, and one of the more genuinely balanced scents in the line in that respect.

When to wear it

Cold weather. The patchouli and leather need cool air and the rose holds up better in it; in heat the animalic facet becomes dominant.

Evenings, dates, romantic evenings and occasions where you want something with weight. It is not an everyday or office fragrance — it is too assertive for either.

About the house

Room 1015 is a Parisian niche house founded in 2015 by Michael Partouche — Dr. Mike — a trained pharmacist who spent five years in London touring with his band before deciding that fragrance was the one discipline that could hold both halves of his life. The name is a hotel room number: 1015 of the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Strip, the "Riot House", where touring bands took their after-parties in the 1970s.

The house calls what it does olfactory counterculture, and every fragrance starts from a specific cultural reference rather than from a material. The bottle is the same throughout — heavy coloured glass sized for the palm, under a faceted cap cut like a dark gem, black for the eaux de parfum and silver for the extraits. Hollyrose is built around the muses of 1970s Sunset Boulevard. See the rest of the line in the Room 1015 collection at Redolia.