Room 1015 Love-O-Matic Eau de Parfum

What it smells like

Love-O-Matic is a clean musk with fruit in it, built on a brief most houses would not attempt: the smell of a laundromat. That sounds like a joke and is not — the fragrance is genuinely about warm cotton, soap and the particular charged atmosphere of a shared public space, and it is the most-loved thing the house makes.

Strawberry, lemon and blackcurrant open it, tart and bright rather than candied. The heart is ozonic notes and bubble gum, which is where the laundromat idea becomes literal: the ozonic accord reads as clean air and warm dryer exhaust, and the bubble gum gives it a soft pink sweetness that is nostalgic rather than childish.

The base is musk, ambrette and cedar — and this is where it lives. The musk is the clean, slightly powdery kind, ambrette adds a natural skin-like warmth, and the cedar keeps a thin woody line under everything. Community accords rank musky at the top, then fruity, ozonic, sweet and powdery.

With over twelve hundred votes and a rating above four, it is comfortably the house's most popular fragrance after Cherry Punk.

Who made it

Composed by Jérôme di Marino, a French perfumer at Mane who trained through Givaudan and Takasago, the latter under Francis Kurkdjian, and who has since composed Kenzo World Power, Burberry Her Elixir de Parfum and Mr. Burberry Element. He is the nose behind most of the current Room 1015 line, and his particular skill is putting a difficult material at the centre of a composition and making it wearable rather than making it a joke.

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

Who it's for

For anyone who likes clean fragrances but finds most of them sterile. The fruit and the bubble gum give this a personality that laundry musks usually lack.

It is an easy recommendation for someone new to niche perfumery, and an easy one for people who want a scent that reads as pleasant to everyone. Within the house it is the friendliest thing on offer — Cherry Punk and Hollyrose are considerably more confrontational.

Unisex and genuinely universal. If you want something challenging, this is not it, and that is the point.

When to wear it

All year, leaning warm. The ozonic and citrus elements lift in heat, and the musk base gives it enough substance for cooler days.

Daytime and everyday wear above all. It is an obvious office fragrance — clean, moderate projection, nothing anyone could object to — and it works for travel and for days when you want to smell good without smelling of anything in particular.

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. Love-O-Matic takes its brief from the countercultural atmosphere of laundromats. See the rest of the line in the Room 1015 collection at Redolia.