New Haarlem

$260.00

Coffee and lavender are the engine here, and Maurice Roucel lets them run without overcomplicating things. The bergamot opening is brief, barely a moment before the coffee establishes itself as the point of the whole composition. Cedar keeps it from going purely sweet, and the vanilla-tonka base is warmer than it is sugary. It smells like a real place, the kind of coffee shop that has existed on the same corner in Harlem for forty years.

Why We Carry This

Roucel's coffee-lavender combination in New Haarlem from 2003 predated the wave of gourmand fragrances that followed by nearly a decade, and it still handles the material with more sophistication than most of what came after. We stock it because the best gourmands age better than their reputation suggests.