How to make your house smell French

Why don’t French homes smell like candles?

Walk into an American house in October and you can usually name the candle. Walk into a French house and you smell the house: fresh air, clean sheets, something on the stove. The French idea is that a home should smell clean, not perfumed, and that a scent is something you notice once, not a cloud you walk through.

Nothing here is expensive. Most of it is a habit.

Start with fresh air

Sacha opens the windows every morning, even in winter. This is not a quirk: aérer, airing the house, is a daily French ritual, and the French health ministry recommends opening up for at least ten minutes a day. In Provence there is a saying that when the Mistral comes in through the window, the doctor goes out through the door.

Ten minutes, windows wide, then close them. The house smells of nothing, which is exactly the point: everything else you add will smell better.

The linen: savon de Marseille and lavender

Savon de Marseille is the old olive-oil soap of Provence. An edict drafted under Colbert in 1688 set the rules for making it, and the classic cubes were sold as “72% oil”. Grate a little into the wash, or keep a cube in the drawer with the tea towels. The sheets come out smelling clean, not perfumed.

The other French classic is a small sachet of dried lavender in the linen cupboard. The towels and sheets pick up the scent slowly, and there is nothing to plug in.

Try it at home

Make Your Home Feel French

Four taps: your room, what it smells like now, how much you want to change. Six small things, the French way.

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One good candle, in one room

If you love scented candles, keep one, and give it a room: the living room or the entry, lit in the evening. Never on the dinner table, where it competes with the food. When it is out, put a glass bell over it. It keeps the dust off and stops the smell of a blown-out wick.

There is more on this in how French people use candles at home.

The old Paris trick: papier d’Arménie

Papier d’Arménie is a little booklet of paper soaked in benzoin resin. Auguste Ponsot and Henri Rivier created it after seeing Armenian households burn benzoin, and it has been made in Montrouge, just outside Paris, since 1885. It was first sold as a disinfectant, which it is not.

You tear off a strip, fold it like an accordion, light it, blow out the flame and let it smoulder on a heat-proof dish. The room smells faintly of vanilla and warm resin for an hour, then of nothing.

Let the kitchen do the rest

There is a bowl of fresh fruit on our counter every day. It smells of the season and tells everyone to help themselves. Add whatever is cooking for dinner, and the house smells French without trying.

If you want the whole thing in six small steps for your own room, take the two-minute home ritual.

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