Taste
The other loves of the house
We gathered here because of fragrance, but nobody arrives from nowhere. One of us came from records, one from the kitchen, one from the cinema seat, one from the badminton court. This is where the house keeps its other loves: the things we cared about before perfume found us, and care about still.
Feature 01 · Travelogue · Indigo clothYou Don’t Miss the City You Miss Who You Were ThereReturning to a beloved city means meeting the distance between a place that kept moving and a self you thought it had kept safe.Read the feature →
Feature 02 · The Curriculum · SteelWho Taught You That This Was Good Taste?Before a preference becomes yours, it usually passes through somebody else’s approval. Learning its history can make it more honest.Read the feature →
Feature 03 · The Hands · TeakNot Every Hobby Needs to Become SomethingThe first thing people ask when you become good at something is whether you could sell it. There are other ways for a pleasure to matter.Read the feature →
Feature 04 · The Rituals · CopperThe Luxury of Leaving Without a PhotographA photograph can deepen attention or turn an afternoon into an assignment. The freedom lies in being able to choose.Read the feature →
Feature 05 · The Table · BrassThe Last Time Everyone Was at the Same TableIt was an ordinary meal until time made it the last one. What a family table holds, and what we can carry forward when its arrangement changes.Read the feature →
New this month
Screen · 132Every Great Anime of the Nineties Was About a Recession
Evangelion, Bebop, Perfect Blue, Lain: the stories Japan told itself after the bubble burst.
Rooms · 131Omotenashi Has No Price Tag
The glass of water that arrives before you ask, and the hospitality no bill can itemise.
Rituals · 130Lagom, or Enough
Secukupnya, lagom: the words we use for the right amount, and what they ask of us.
The Curriculum · 129The Ledger, No. 1: A Cup Made by Hand
One number from the economy, one object from the kitchen counter. This time: food inflation and a pour-over.
Signal · 128Refreshing the Exchange Rate
On checking a number we cannot change, and what the habit quietly spends.
Objects · 127Cost per Use, Honestly
The quiet arithmetic of things that last, and who is actually able to do it.
Last month
The Curriculum · 121Would You Still Like It If Nobody Knew?
On the pleasures we keep and the audiences we carry.
Sound · 122The Shame of Liking Something Obvious
What happens when knowledge makes pleasure harder to admit?
The Curriculum · 123The Pleasure of Being a Beginner in Private
Before preference becomes a performance of knowledge.
Signal · 124When Everything Becomes a Recommendation
The experience is still happening. The review has already begun.
Rooms · 125A Beautiful Room Where Nobody Can Relax
Hospitality begins where the photograph ends.
Objects · 126The Things We Save for a Life We Never Live
On keeping beautiful things for an occasion that never quite arrives.
The Curriculum · 120Who Can Afford to Wait?
A delay can be inconvenient for one household and unaffordable for another. Whose time disappears inside the request to be patient?
Rituals · 119The Right to an Ordinary Day
Water at the tap. A familiar route to school. Dinner without a contingency plan. The ordinary is something a society has to make possible.
The Curriculum · 118The People Who Cannot Turn Off the News
For some people the news is something to leave behind. For others it is the place they still have to live.
Rooms · 117Who Gets to Sit Here?
A city reveals its hospitality in the places where a person can stop.
Screen · 116Why Nothing Happening Can Feel Like Everything
What a film makes visible when it lets an ordinary action take its time.
Screen · 115Who Taught Us What the Past Looks Like?
The past had colours of its own. Cinema taught us which ones to remember.
Objects · 114The Difference Between Old and Aged
Time changes everything. Improvement is a more particular achievement.
The Curriculum · 113Knowing More Can Make You Enjoy Less
How to become more perceptive without turning every pleasure into an examination.
The Table · 112The Last Time Everyone Was at the Same Table
It was an ordinary meal until time made it the last one. What a family table holds, and what we can carry forward when its arrangement changes.
The Rituals · 111The Luxury of Leaving Without a Photograph
A photograph can deepen attention or turn an afternoon into an assignment. The freedom lies in being able to choose.
The Hands · 110Not Every Hobby Needs to Become Something
The first thing people ask when you become good at something is whether you could sell it. There are other ways for a pleasure to matter.
The Curriculum · 109Who Taught You That This Was Good Taste?
Before a preference becomes yours, it usually passes through somebody else’s approval. Learning its history can make it more honest.
Travelogue · 108You Don’t Miss the City You Miss Who You Were There
Returning to a beloved city means meeting the distance between a place that kept moving and a self you thought it had kept safe.
People who make things→
Makers who are not perfumers: dyers, weavers, potters, smiths. What a lifetime at one bench teaches.
Things worth owning slowly→
Verdicts after years, not weeks: the knife, the lamp, the notebook. Judged the way the house judges materials, by how they age.
Taste, literally→
Coffee from Gayo and Toraja, sambal, kaiseki, the long dinner that refuses to end. The sister sense, given its own chair.
Places that stay on the skin→
Journeys kept as sensory records rather than itineraries: Toba at dawn, Yogyakarta in the rain, Seminyak at six a.m.
Records the house wears out→
Jazz at midnight, gamelan at dusk, the album that survives every commute. Music written the way it is actually listened to.
Frames we keep returning to→
Cinema and anime taken seriously: Ozu’s rooms, Kon’s mirrors, the neon forests. What the eye keeps after the credits.
Books doing quiet work on us→
The shelf behind the house: essays, fiction, the philosophy that leaks into the bottles. Reading as slow perfumery.
The body’s own tastes→
Badminton, silat, the sea, the grand prix. Sport as craft, and what the body knows before the mind does.
Worn, not displayed→
Cut, cloth and the quiet signals of dress: the trench, the sarong, the suit that agrees with you. Judged by wear, never by season.
Spaces that change you→
Architecture and interiors: the courtyard, the shadow, the room that lowers your voice. What Ando, Bawa and a good kampung house all know.
Cross-subjects, taught gently→
One real subject per lesson, finance to physics, explained through something you can hold. School, without the classroom.
Technology, examined slowly→
The machines that run the day, taken apart without worship or panic: the AI age, the feed, and what they cannot sense.
The tropics' real clock→
Rain on hot ground, the roar on the roof, two winds and a gold hour. The climate as calendar, and what it does to a nose.
Ceremonies of the ordinary day→
The barbershop, the bath, the first incense: small liturgies, done properly, that keep a day upright.
Nothing arrives from nowhere
Taste is not bought whole. It is assembled slowly, out of everything a person has already loved: the record that played in a parent’s car, the first coffee that tasted of somewhere, the film watched three times in one week. By the time anyone reaches perfume, they are already carrying all of it.
This journal is the house admitting that. We make fragrance, but we were not born in a laboratory. We came from kitchens, courts, cinemas, record shops and long bus rides, and those rooms still decide what we find beautiful. What follows is a contents page of those earlier loves, kept in fourteen standing sections and written in the house’s own pace.
Even the colors on this page are borrowed from the workbench: teak, pewter, brass, indigo cloth, walnut, velvet, linen, verdigris, raw silk, smoked oak, steel, titanium, zinc and copper. One material for each section. Read it the way you would walk a market: no order, no obligation. Stop where something smells familiar.
Everyone here came from somewhere: a court, a kitchen, a record shop. The Interviews is where we sit with people and ask about the loves that made them. Join one, and let the house write your world into the journal.
Join the interview