Our Story

Perfume, as the far west remembers it

Maison Elowen is a small perfume house at the far west of England. We work from a granite building above Penzance harbour that once dried fishing nets. The nets are gone. The light that dried them is still here, and it is the light we make perfume in.

Morwenna Hale started the house after fifteen years as a perfumer in London, when she came home to the Penwith moors. She wanted perfume the way this coast remembers it: by place and by hour, not by trend. Elowen is the Cornish word for elm; there was one in the yard when she signed the lease.

A scene, not a scent

Each perfume we make is a scene we know well. A cliff path at noon, yellow in every direction. The hour after rain on a slate roof. A Victorian glasshouse in late August. We begin with a place and a time of day, not a list of notes, and go back to it, season after season, until the bottle agrees with the memory.

Small batches, by hand

We make a few hundred bottles at a time. Every one is filled, labelled and boxed in the net loft; every box carries its batch number and the month it was filled. When a batch runs out, the next is three to four weeks away. We would rather you waited than we hurried.

Try before you choose

The Discovery Set holds all six perfumes at two millilitres each, because perfume cannot be smelt through a screen. The £24 comes back as a single-use code in the parcel, to use against a 50 ml or 100 ml bottle within 90 days.