Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Save articles for later Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time. Got it Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size For Moody Ko, memories of his childhood in Taiwan are dominated by the scent of jasmine, worn by his grandfather, a lover of perfume, who would bring bouquets of the flower to their local temple.
When he came to Australia to study art, fragrance remained a strong influence, and in 1997 he opened his own boutique in Sydney’s Haymarket, calling it The Garden of Spring . The warm, eclectic space is a far cry from the sanitised perfume halls in department stores. It’s where you’ll find all manner of oddities from around the globe, like a perfume made by a Romanian filmmaker that smells like old leather cinema chairs, cigarette butts and popcorn.
Ko and his two employees – Tah Chantarat and Jasmine Chow – are repositories of information, weaving a rich backstory of each fragrance. Take, for example, a range formulated by a young Taiwanese perfumer who splits his time between caring for his elderly father and tinkering away on macerations in his apartment upstairs. Ko finds these artisans on his travels across the globe, at trade fairs and sometimes even on the street.
His customers run the gamut from dentists and lawyers, to jewellery designers, to teenage boys with their mums on the hunt for their first fragrance. Operating by appointment only, Ko has resisted.