Back in the summer of 2021, we paid a visit to the home of Junior Adesanya, founder of cult incense brand Cremate, in a quest to learn more about the power of scent at home for The Modern House Magazine Issue No.3. Smell is something of an underexplored aspect of interior spaces. But not for Junior: he’s long been charmed by potent aromas – his mother’s Nigerian cooking, rain hitting tarmac – and creates fragrant products to match. Read on to discover what scent means to Junior, and why he begins every day with some ritual incense burning. And keep your eyes peeled for news of our forthcoming spring/summer issue coming soon.

What does home smell like to you?
The concept of home is an internal thing for me and there are certain criterial tenets that I carry everywhere to fulfil that. Home smells like familiarity, which spurs on comfort and relaxation. Right now, that’s the incense – the whole house smells like it. Lavender is an ingredient I use a lot so even outside of the house its scent immediately makes me think of home.

Also, my mum’s cooking. My mum was Nigerian born and raised, and then moved here and had me and my siblings. Her cooking was a specific smell we’d only experience at home or if we went to another friend’s house of the same background.There would be lots of spice involved – always peppers and scotch bonnets. The smell when you slice open a scotch bonnet and get that first kick is nostalgic, and smells like home to me.

What are your top five favourite smells?
Agarwood, which is used in oud. It’s a fragrant musky wood. It’s so good, you can use it as a perfume, which I tend to do a lot. Then rose geranium, which I use in my scents. I really like rose oil but it’s not sustainable because the amount of biomass you need to yield a small bit of oil is wild. Pound for pound it’s more expensive than gold. Next is that smell when you’re outside on warm evening, it’s starting to hit dusk and then rain hits against tarmac. Sharpies. Sharpies smell great. And frankincense resin. Proper raw, harvested resin.

What smells take you back to childhood?
The smell of gym mats in school. It was an interesting-slash-gross smell. Foam is another one. In my early teens, I started doing martial arts and the armour and equipment were made of thick foam.That’s a prolific smell for me. My parents were Catholic and my earliest memory of incense was at church.

Then came skateboarding – in skate shops there’s a tendency for guys to smoke weed and they would burn incense to cover up the smell. There was also a strange occult store in my hometown, between Woolwich and Thamesmead, south-east London. It would terrify everyone of Black Afro-Caribbean or African descent and Christian religion. As a curious kid I would go in, and they would burn loads of incense.

What is your approach to scent in the home?
I burn incense every day. Every morning I’ll wake up, have some coffee, and burn an incense. I have always been into scents that are potent. As incense is carried by smoke it’s strong and lingers. I’m into the whole ritual of burning incense as well.

I have always been into the idea of scent in spaces. Until recently in the western world, you would curate the look of a space and it would stop there. Scent has always been like the last refuge – no one would pay attention to it too much. But people are starting to realise what it can do to mood.

How do you think our experiences of space are influenced by scent?
Smell pushes human experience. There’s the concept of being nose- blind when you’re at home – it has an aroma you don’t experience because you’re used to it. When you present people with scents they wouldn’t necessarily come across in a certain space, you get more of a response. We’ve had an audio-visual boom in technology, but we’ve not had one for scent because it’s hard to digitise. But there’s so much in one scent that is connected to the brain. It’s powerful.