Maison Clérel
A century of craft, finally legible online.
Maison Clérel is a fictional Parisian niche perfumery founded in 2019 by Marie-Hélène Clérel, a former Givaudan perfumer who left the industry to create a small house focused on olfactory memory. The brief: build a brand and digital presence that could hold its own alongside Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle and Diptyque — without their budgets.
The client had three fragrances, no website, no logo, and a very clear sense of what they didn't want: anything that felt mass-market, trend-chasing, or visually loud.
We named the house after the founder's family name. The wordmark uses a custom-lettered version of the name in a style referencing 1920s Parisian signage — high-contrast stroke weight, subtle serif, wider tracking than conventional luxury. The monogram device (an interlocking M and C within a geometric circle) is derived from a 1931 French Art Deco bookplate we found in a Paris flea market archive — the same motif that became the favicon.
Fragrance line:
- Lumière de Crépuscule — vetiver, amber, smoked iris. The opening fragrance. Named for the specific quality of light at dusk over the Seine.
- Cuir Blanc — white leather, neroli, cardamom. Clean and unsettling. A contradiction.
- Mémoire de Jardin — fig leaf, green tomato, rain on stone. A childhood garden in Normandy.
Voice: Unhurried. Exacting. Warm without being familiar. The writing treats the reader as someone who already understands why this matters.
Colour system:
--noir-atelier: #0f0e0c — not pure black; the colour of a Paris workshop at night--or-vif: #c9a84c — aged gold, not polished--crème: #f5f0e8 — warm white, like unbleached linen--or-sombre: #a8893d — gold in shadow
Typography: Didot for display (the quintessential French luxury serif — high contrast, rational, elegant); Garamond for editorial body text; Neue Haas Grotesk for functional UI.
Five pages: Home (brand atmosphere and the three fragrances), Fragrances (individual pages per scent with olfactory notes), Atelier (the story of the house and founder), Wholesale (trade enquiries, deliberately minimal), Contact.
The decision to exclude e-commerce was intentional. Direct sale would have required shipping infrastructure and diluted the positioning. The site functions as a discovery and wholesale tool.
Dark-first palette. Most luxury perfumery sites default to white. We went dark because the fragrances themselves are about depth, memory, and interiority — not brightness. The dark palette also makes the gold accents earn their appearance rather than competing with everything.
Horizontal fragrance gallery. Each fragrance card occupies the full viewport height and scrolls horizontally rather than vertically. This is a deliberate pacing decision — you encounter each fragrance one at a time, the way you actually smell perfume.
No photography of people. Every image is object or atmosphere. Perfume is personal; showing a face imposes an identity the buyer might not share.
The monogram as system. The 1931 device appears at multiple scales: large in the hero, medium as a section divider, small as the favicon. It unifies the visual language without needing a complex component system.
- Brand identity: wordmark, monogram device, colour system, typographic scale
- Design system: component library for the web interface
- SvelteKit website with custom animations and horizontal scroll gallery
- Wholesale enquiry flow
- Art direction guidelines for ongoing photography and content
The full interactive implementation is available in the preview above.