Essential oils, or concentrated plants and herbs, are a common way to lend a fresh smell to your space if you're not a fan of perfumed candles or air fresheners.
Reed diffusers are a great way to make your home smell like a hotel. The trick to getting the entire house smelling great is to place a couple of reed diffusers around the home. Remember, the larger the home, the more reed diffusers you need.
Good choices for scents in hotels include sandalwood, vanilla, cedar, lemon blossom, citrus, neroli, leather, and white tea. You can then add in less common scents specific to your hotel experience, such as lemon verbena, jasmine, coconut, patchouli, lavender, and more. And that crisp smell on hotel sheets?
Deactivated charcoal: Charcoal will not add a scent to the air but it will absorb malodors. Baking soda: Just as baking soda works to absorb odors in your refrigerator, a bowl placed in a room will also absorb odors. Lemon water: Water absorbs odors and adding slices of fresh lemon will provide a clean citrus scent.
It's all thanks to a clever gizmo known as an HVAC scent diffuser. These are ultra-quiet attachments to heating/air conditioning systems that use high amounts of air pressure to deliver nanoparticles of scented oils uniformly around a room, area, or building.
Once you have a fresh olfactory slate to work with, there are some tried-and-true scents to use for helping to sell a house, including vanilla, citrus (like orange or lemon), and other clean, fresh scents. Cilantro and cucumber are also good, as are aromatic kitchen herbs such as thyme or rosemary.
Apparently there is something called “Occupant Odor.” These odors come from the detergents you use, cooking smells, cleaning supplies, and room fresheners. These scents then occupy spaces like curtains, carpets, cushions and pillows. Combined together, the meshing of these scents creates your distinct home smell.
Lots of things can impact the scent of a home. The owners may have old furniture or pets, be near the ocean, or be baking bread. The types of cleaners they use or how often they vacuum can also impact smell.
The Ritz Carlton scent experience
The Ritz-Carlton Chicago is delicate combination of Grasse rose and green tea, fused with juicy cassis, verbena and white jasmine evoking a sense of opulence and classic beauty.
Try combining complementary scents, like chamomile, lavender and vanilla or a mixture of different citrus oils. A blend of rosemary, lemon and lavender also yields a yummy aroma, as does wild orange with peppermint. Start small with just a few drops at a time and work your way up to more.
Cordelia Smith founder of Formulary 55 believes you can't go wrong with citrus. “Most choose fresh, clean scents for their home— typically something in the citrus family. Anything that offers a clean-smelling experience.” Another way to choose a home fragrance is to base it off of a favorite personal fragrance.
Crafted by luxury fragrance company Antica Farmacista and named after its coveted address on Central Park South, the scent evokes the park's delicate beauty, brimming with notes of elderflower, mountain mint, and ripe strawberries.
If you ask OG perfumer, Coco Chanel, “elegance is when the inside is as beautiful as the outside,” which translated, surely means that elegant perfumes are the feel-good scents that you feel a personal connection to. They're the scents that make you feel fancy, or powerful, or pulled together, or at ease.
And according to the results, vanilla is the most pleasing smell around, followed by ethyl butyrate, which smells like peaches.
mVOCs are the number one culprit of old house smell
When mold, bacteria, biofilm, and other biological growths decay, they emit mVOCs — the gases we identify as old house smell. We associate the smell of mVOCs with older homes since older buildings are often more likely to have decaying biological growths.