Notes from the Tack Room

Saddle Room took longer to compose than anything else in the collection, and it began with a smell that almost everyone who has spent time around horses will recognise at once.

It is the tack room on the evening before a meet: saddles freshly soaped, bridles hung to dry, a bale of hay split open by the door, and a lantern that has been burning a little too long. It is warm, clean and faintly smoky, and it is nothing at all like the leather of a new handbag.

Leather, without the swagger

Most leather fragrances are loud. They lean on birch tar and castoreum to shout about it. We wanted the leather of care and use: supple, worn, a little sweet from the soap. We found it in suede and hay absolute, with only the smallest thread of birch smoke.

We wanted the leather of care and use, not the leather of the shop window.

Saffron and bitter orange give the opening its golden, lantern-lit glow. Tonka and sandalwood keep the base close and warm. It is, we think, the most gentlemanly leather we could make, and it is equally at home on anyone who has ever cleaned a bridle by hand.