California Cool Meets a Whole Lotta Lautner in This Stylish Perfume Store
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Of all of our senses, scent is the most powerful conduit for memory. It’s why the smell of a fresh box of crayons transports you to your first day of school, or why a whiff of an ex’s cologne spurs a beeline for the next subway car.
If olfaction is a gateway to our past lives, then D.S. & Durga’s perfumes are a detour to somewhere else entirely. Through its surrealist aromas, the Brooklyn-founded cult fragrance label aims to bottle up the giddiness of a Pixies concert or the sophistication of the Carlyle Hotel. One elixir even challenges you to smell the rainbow. “Perfume,” as the brand’s motto goes, “is armchair travel.”
The perfumer’s first West Coast boutique, which opened in Venice, California, earlier this summer, beckons you to come along for the ride. With its spare palette of concrete, pine, and plaster and a sweeping homage to Atomic Age architect John Lautner, the compact shop marries modernism and Muscle Beach.
D.S. & Durga cofounder Kavi Moltz wouldn’t have it any other way. Before launching the company with her husband, self-taught perfumer David Moltz in 2008, she was a practicing architect in New York. But “a lot of my architectural philosophies were formed in L.A.,” says Moltz, who received her master’s degree from the boundary-pushing architecture school SCI-Arc. “I was hugely influenced by all the midcentury modernists.”
It’s no surprise, then, that these early influences waft through the Venice store. Working alongside Krista Ninivaggi and Shanna Chan of the architecture firm Woods Bagot, Moltz opted to pay homage to one of Southern California’s most famous residences, Lautner’s Elrod House. The otherworldly concrete lair, designed in 1968 for decorator Arthur Elrod, is a quintessential example of organic architecture, nestled into natural rock formations and capped with a dramatic, sunburstlike concrete roof (James Bond buffs will recognize it from Diamonds Are Forever, when 007 gets his butt kicked by two acrobatic assailants).
“Kavi and I just both love that house,” says Ninivaggi, who has not only collaborated on D.S. & Durga’s two previous outposts, but is also Moltz’s high school classmate. “Even without us talking about it, we both had a very strong, strong pull toward that type of look.”
As you enter the new D.S. & Durga storefront off Abbot Kinney Boulevard, you are drawn through via the shop’s most dramatic gesture: a mini version of Lautner’s space-age ceiling. Unlike the IRL version, this one isn’t structural (the radial design was achieved by placing a cement coating on a spoke-shaped frame), but with lit panels that feel like skylights, you could be fooled.
The sculptural ceiling sweeps across the sales floor and a trio of geometric plinths, two that display and store D.S. & Durga merchandise and another that serves as a formal point of sale. For the previous New York boutiques, Moltz and Ninivaggi developed a coolly minimal language, with straitlaced material palettes, clean lines, and a gallerylike vibe, save for “Beetlejuice-y” ceramic light fixtures by Entler Studio. The Venice outpost, however—in reference to its Pacific location—features mellower tones and tactile finishes, like a chocolaty-brown concrete floor, warm gray plaster walls, and stained Douglas fir panels. Two of the display plinths have striated concrete surfaces that conjure the organic feel of rammed earth, a move that’s recognizable from D.S. & Durga’s Brooklyn branch. Here, though, the colors were once again warmed up for the sun-soaked California context.
A smaller, ancillary room at the back provides another moment of drama. Here the walls have been coated in a metal alloy, the result of a collaboration with Brooklyn-based finishes firm Kamp Studios. A round skylight accentuates the burnished surface, making the walls gleam softly like pencil lead. Programmable LED lighting, meanwhile, can be tuned to different hues, allowing visitors to undergo a synesthetic experience (David, the brand’s cofounder and lead perfumer, perceives fragrances as color) while sampling different fragrances. It ties back in with the label’s wanderlust-inspired maxim, Ninivaggi says: “We always have it in the back of our heads as we design these spaces. It’s so poetic. And it’s something that we never forget.”
“You become like a kid in a candy store,” adds Moltz of the design experience. “There’re so many cool things to do with retail design, and you can get away with so much because the whole point of it is to create a beautiful, immersive experience.”
To celebrate the location’s opening, D.S. & Durga released a limited-edition candle called Pacific Mythic, with top notes of palm, avocado leaf, and jasmine. Like the shop itself, the scent is “like an East Coast kid’s vision of Venice, California, and the L.A. beach,” Moltz explains.
No surprise, it’s already sold out.
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