Clik here to view.
To the frequent traveler, an exhaustive agenda is quotidian: Packed bags, taxi, traffic, calls, flight, emails, land, more calls, more emails, more traffic, another taxi, hotel, bags unpacked, meal, meetings, sleep, repeat. Both thrilling and tiring, cycles of deracinating voyages thread your life through places far from home.
Yet as you walk through the halls of AC Hotels, you may have noticed an invisible, still somehow grounding force envelope you. Notes of fir balsam, amber, and fig echo more of a solitary walk through a forest rather than an austere lobby. Not only is the scent diffused in the hotels’ public spaces, but you may have seen a dark charcoal candle’s flame flickering in the lounge, its angular shape silhouetted upon the wall. While we may not (quite yet) be able to transport you to the nearest available woods to decompress, we can certainly invite the feeling into your sensory experience.
AC Hotels joined creative forces with Joya Studio’s Frederick Bouchardy to give life to a signature scent for our spaces. Using the hotel as a sensory-scape that appeals not only to sight, touch, taste, and sound, smell is no less of a key component to feeling at home with AC Hotels. And a part of that feeling is deeply rooted in olfactory memory.
“A signature scent means that it really smells like something– it’s not trying to please everyone.” — Frederick Bouchardy
“It’s wholly about the experience, because most of what this fragrance is doing is invisible. Fragrance affects your brain. The limbic system is related to both your emotional and evolutionary experiences. The hippocampus is the part of your brain that forms memories, and initially does so because we needed to remember things for survival tactics. We all have really powerful fragrant memories,” says Bouchardy. “This scent is in the environment, and is distributed invisibly. It’s also a candle, which is the physical manifestation of the experience — an ancient art form, a source of light and a beautiful, natural flickering thing that has its own life in your space. You will have the option to take that experience home too, as a memory.”
The AC Hotels signature scent is complex both in form and function. It was built to bring the outdoors in for the uprooted traveler who constantly shifts between worlds. AC Hotels’ guests are always on the move, sociable, hyper-productive and motivated.
“In that world one always wants to be reminded of the outdoors,” adds Bouchardy. “It’s a comfort thing. Life isn’t all about being indoors, work and your screens.”
The scent features five highlights: cut grass and root, fig leaf and stem, gum resins, amber elements, and fir balsam. The result is a mixing of contrasts– angular and modern, yet earthen and inviting, that encapsulates all that the hotel hopes to bring to its guests.
Clik here to view.
“A signature scent means that it really smells like something– it’s not trying to please everyone,” adds Bouchardy. “The scent is a strong part of AC Hotels’ identity because it is speaking to some of the most important elements of the hotel. It’s a mix of different elements — angular, tradition, signature, modern and green — and they add up to the identity of the hotel in the way that it addresses contrasts between different worlds, and modern angles versus traditional heritage. It’s a balance between inspired optimism and overgrown, vivid greenness, but also control, restraint and design.”
And while the scent works in contrast with the hotel’s very nature as an indoor space, it’s equally a visual and sensory reflection of the hotel’s architecture and Spanish heritage.
“Angles and curves are really key in this hotel,” Bouchardy adds. “And so that took shape in the actual physical form of the candle part of the fragrance, but also in terms of the development of the signature scent. And I think all fragrances are studies in contrast. And this one is more extreme in its study, as there are wild elements, and restrained ones.”
Take a mindful, deeper breath as you come home from a long day of meetings. Let the earthen notes help your feet relax a little more deeply into the ground. Strike a match, burn your candle and take a moment to bask in its warm light. It’s the small moments that can transport your spirit to a peaceful place that needn’t require a taxi or airport to arrive there. Experience a time and place much more simple than your packed schedule, or that bag you need to re-pack.
“We want to thread the needle between something that is memorable, yet doesn’t impose an opinion upon anyone’s experience. Guests may not remember that they remember how the scent made them feel, but they will definitely remember — consciously or not,” says Bouchardy. “It’s a return-to-home element of the scent that will link all the hotel properties around the world together. They will always smell the same– the scent is the first thing when you walk in, and the last thing when you leave.”
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
