Oftentimes, you meet The One when it’s the most inconvenient. That was certainly the case for Phway Su Aye, founder of the modern fragrance house, , whose first date with husband-to-be Johannes Loefstrand took place just days before she was heading to Lisbon with the plan of moving there. “I didn’t have any intention for it to get serious,” she jokes now.
“I had worn a full-on puffer jacket from head to toe, no make-up, and only a spritz of fragrance – Gabar’s 02 Ground if I remember correctly. But we hit it off immediately and just talked for hours. It felt as if we were two long lost friends reuniting after a long time apart.
” Portugal continued to play an important role in the couple’s relationship: it was the site of their third date (“For most people, a third date of that nature probably wouldn’t have made a lot of sense, but we felt so comfortable with each other from the get-go that it all just flowed so naturally,” she remembers), as well as their proposal and wedding. “He picked this beautiful, secluded beach by the hotel that we were staying at, on the West Coast of Portugal,” she recalls of the proposal. “After a massage, I went to the beach to meet him at sunset and he was standing so sweetly on a bench waving with a picnic basket in his hands.
That’s when I started to clock things. We walked all the way down to the beach side, and magically everybody that was there disappeared and there was just this lone fisherman left as the sun .
