Burnt Cedar Rainbow Doves

Burnt Cedar Rainbow Doves is one of the strangest and most beautiful fragrances we've created. Our London Craft Week collaboration with The Beaumont Hotel involved reading Lord Berners' autobiographies, picking up random facts from others' accounts of lives which bordered on his own extraordinary one, and deciding how to represent it in scent.

Eventually, we decided on the garden of his country house, which he inherited unexpectedly, giving him the opportunity to escape life in the lower ranks of the civil service and entertain the Bright Young People. He could do whatever he wanted, and he chose to be generous and kind, outrageous and amusing.

We felt a bond with our chosen artist-musician-writer-aesthete and his wicked sense of humour. It's part establishment part whimsy, like Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson 14th Baron Berners himself. Nancy Mitford portrayed him in her novels as Lord Merlin, played here by Andrew Scott.

Elsa Schiaparelli encouraged Lord Berners to make a fragrance with civet, but Nancy Mitford talked him out of it. Here it is, only 60 years late.

The aroma of Lord Berners' garden, around 1933 -