Pierre Guillaume Animal Mondain, photo via Pierre Guillaume, Instagram

High, angular beams flood the entry way, casting geometric figures across the stairs as you enter. As you look before you, everywhere light creates shape and form. The straight, high ceilings and broad room with its deliberate angles, gleaming finishes and smoothed corners is toweringly surreal, like a film set from L’Inhumaine or Metropolis. You move, and your shadow becomes part of the vast room’s design. It draws blocks and lines each step. another room, down a curved corridor, Falling in Love Again is playing on a phonograph, sung by that unmistakably husky voice against the crackle of the recording. The rich odor of pipe tobacco seeps from under a half-closed door. Laughter spills like smashed champagne across the floors, and, as you draw nearer, an echo of face powder, the dark odor of wood varnish hit you. Welcome to Villa Cavrois, circa 1932. This way to the smoking room, if you please.

Villa Cavrois, photo by Virginie Roose

Animal Mondain (‘worldly animal”) which launched on October 1, is the newest in Pierre Guillaume’s Black Collection (formerly the Huitieme Art Collection). It is inspired by the 1930s and Modernism in its various forms, from Art Deco and Bauhaus to Surrealism. Referencing Marlene Dietrich’s “assumed androgyny” and, in particular, the sleek, cinematic architecture of Robert Mallet-Stevens, Animal Mondain is a surrealist tobacco-powder fragrance, a perfume parallel to the simple elegance of modernist style but with a distinct touch of quirk.

Pierre Guillaume, photo via Pierre Guillaume Paris

Modernism rejected conservative values including realism and embraced innovation. The same could be said for the ever-evolving, unique oeuvre of M. Guillaume, who often blends unexpected notes with such deftness and fearlessness that his creations seem to invent new categories of his own. Think of the startling caraway note in his brilliant Querelle, hemp (at a time when no one was doing weed scents) mixed with coffee and leather in the delicious, cosseting Coze, the pitch-perfect cocoa dust note in Musc et Maori. In Animal Mondain, Guillaume adds “a new tobacco … stripped of all artifice” and “gender-free.”

courtesy of Pierre Guillaume Paris

Animal Mondain starts with a hefty dose of coumarin, smelling of milky fresh hay and ground nuts. This is quickly followed by some mulchy, sweet, soapy tobacco, still moist from the pouch, and sweet green pear leaves. A thin ribbon of something anisic, almost like black licorice whip, trickles through. At this point, Animal Mondain reminds me a bit of By Killian Back to Black, but without the dollops of fruit and incense. As I start to get used to the coumarin, the tobacco intensifies and grows drier, more like expensive cigars (and yes, I’ve smoked a Cuban or two). An interesting thing then happens: I take a swig of my tea and find that its flavour is inflected with smoke. I smell my wrist again; Animal Mondain’s tobacco note has grown darker, earthier. And there’s an animalic quality – subtle – creeping in.

Marlene Dietrich, photo by Eugene Robert Richee

The next stage is all about the interplay of old-fashioned face powder – the kind you might find backstage at the Belasco Theatre around 1935 – and the quietly shifting tobacco note. The coumarin settles down and the tobacco comes further forward. But its is the powder that dominates. There’s something melancholy in its smell that suggests a faded photograph on a chipped dressing table, discarded paste tiara and damp, worn furs – the unglamorous trappings of artifice. In this strange aura, the tobacco and pear leaf begin to act as a fresh, jaunty counterbalance.

Charles Boyer Getty Images

At different moments, Animal Mondain strikes me as masculine and feminine. When the face powder and coumarin interlace early on, it smells like a ladylike vintage powder scent in the vein of Caron Farnesiana. But when these notes ebb and the woods take charge, Pierre Guillame Paris Animal Mondain smells like the sort of binary fragrance both Charles Boyer and Marlene Dietrich might each have worn in The Garden of Allah.

photo courtesy of Pierre Guillaume Paris

While the smoke drifts, and the smells of wood varnish, make-up and honey linger, the phonograph is reset, highballs are poured into tall crystal glasses, and the lights tango across the reflecting pool beyond the walls. It has become quite the party at the Villa Cavrois.

Notes: Turkish tobacco absolute, pear tree leaves, Guyana mahogany, animalic powder.

Disclaimer: Bottle of Pierre Guillaume Paris Animal Mondain generously provided by Pierre Guillaume. My opinions are my own. Available  exclusively at Pierre Guillaume Paris

Lauryn Beer, Senior Editor

You can read Michelyn’s interview with Pierre Guillaume here

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