Maison
STARTUP
IOT
E-COMMERCE
About the Project
Our team wanted to bring long-familiar smells into every home: petrichor after rain, the woody air of an old library, a room that has just been painted. Almost nothing on the market does that. Home fragrance sells florals and vanilla in a bottle that runs dry, gets thrown away, and is replaced by the same bottle again. The object is disposable by design, and the scent arrives whether you asked for it or not. Maison inverts that. The object stays; only the scent changes. A machined aluminium base, a perforated lantern that holds a warm light, and a cartridge that slides in and lives for weeks. No liquid, no bottle, no waste left behind. I'm one of Maison's founders — the device, the system around it, the brand, the app, and the website.
Research & Direction
Two observations set the brief. The first was waste. The industry sells you a new object every time you want a new scent, and the packaging outlives the fragrance by centuries. Even the newer smart diffusers are oil-based and need endless refilling. The fix was structural, not cosmetic: make the object durable and the consumable small. The second was control. A candle has one setting. A reed diffuser has none. Scent should behave the way light does — something you dim, schedule, and forget about. Light and scent are the two things that actually decide how a room feels, and they were still being sold as separate products. From that came four constraints the design had to hold: - An object worth leaving in the open, not hiding behind a sofa - A refill small enough to post and cheap enough to change often - Scent treated like light — adjustable, scheduled, ambient - A subscription where the device is included, so the commitment is to the scent, not the hardware The tension throughout was between a premium object and a consumable business. The object had to feel permanent enough that the subscription felt like a rhythm rather than a bill.
Design Process
The reference wasn't the fragrance aisle. It was industrial hardware: brushed metal, perforation, exposed function, nothing decorative that isn't also structural. I designed the device from first sketches through CMF and final renders, modelling and lighting everything in Blender. The lantern exists in three shades — Mesh, Satin and Venetian — each changing how the light escapes and how the object reads across a room. The base is anodised aluminium, weighted, meant to sit on a shelf for a decade. The identity followed the object: monospaced, quiet, industrial, closer to a technical document than a lifestyle brand. The fragrance collection is named for places rather than notes — Woody, Wet Concrete, Fresh, Subway — because a scent is a memory of somewhere, not a list of ingredients. The app had one job: to disappear. I defined the information architecture and designed the core experience — spaces, device control, diffusion, light and intensity, and rituals that let a home run its own atmosphere on a schedule. Inserting a cartridge is all the setup there is; the base recognises what it's holding and the app adjusts. Yura Gakh refined the visual layer. Dima Lazutkin brought it into motion.
ECOLOGICAL INITIATIVE
This world is in dire need of problem solving, and a category that produces a piece of landfill every few weeks is a good place to start. Maison works differently. No bottles to throw away, no liquid to refill, no waste left behind. The scent is held until you want it and released only when you do, never a drop more. When it's spent, you replace a single cartridge — not the whole object.
WHERE IT IS NOW
- Product design finalised and registered at INPI - App prototype complete; site live - Product–market fit study completed with the target audience, and a subscription model defined across two tiers with the device included - Next: a launch campaign toward the first thousand people on the waitlist, then a functional prototype