How to Make Your House Smell Good, and Keep It That Way

Fragrance layered over a smell does not cancel it. The two sit beside each other, and the combination is usually worse than the original. So the first job is finding what is causing the smell, not choosing what to buy.

Find what is actually causing the smell

Four places account for most household odour, and none of them are obvious from the middle of the room:

• Drains. Kitchen sinks and shower traps build a film of grease and hair that smells faintly sour. Boiling water and a spoon of bicarbonate clears it.
• Soft furnishings. Curtains, rugs, upholstery and cushions hold months of cooking, smoke and pet smell. They are the reason a room smells the same after you have cleaned every hard surface.
• The bin, including the bin itself. Emptying it does nothing if the plastic underneath the liner is coated.
• Damp. Behind furniture on an outside wall, under the sink, the back of a wardrobe. A musty note that returns within hours of airing is almost always moisture.

You cannot smell your own house properly. Nobody can. Your nose stops registering a constant smell within about twenty minutes, which is why a room can seem fine to you and obvious to a visitor. Leave for an hour and walk back in through the front door. That first ten seconds is the only honest reading you will get.

Move the air before you add anything to it

Ten minutes of two windows open on opposite sides of the house shifts more stale air than an afternoon with one window cracked. Air needs an exit as well as an entrance.

This matters for scent too. A fragrance sitting in still air stays in a two-foot cloud around whatever is producing it. The same fragrance near a doorway, a hallway, or an air vent travels through the whole floor.

Then choose how you add scent

The method decides how long it lasts and how it smells three hours in.

• Candles smell strong within a few feet and stop the moment you blow them out. Good for an evening, useless for a house.
• Reed diffusers rely on oil creeping up sticks and evaporating. Quiet, low maintenance, and rarely noticeable more than a metre away.
• Plug-ins warm the oil to release it. Heat breaks down the top notes first, so the scent flattens over the first week and ends up smelling synthetic.
• Ultrasonic diffusers mix oil with water and push out a visible mist. You are diluting the fragrance and adding humidity, and the tank needs cleaning or it starts to smell of the tank.
• Cold-air diffusers break undiluted oil into a dry micro-mist using pressure alone. No water, no heat, nothing to degrade the oil. The particles are small enough to stay suspended and drift through a room instead of falling out of the air near the device.

Cold-air diffusion is what hotels use, which is why a lobby smells the same at the door as it does by the lift, and the same in the evening as it did that morning.

Run it in bursts

The same adaptation that stops you smelling your own house stops you smelling your own diffuser. Run it continuously and within half an hour you will be convinced it has stopped working, usually just before you turn it up and make the house overwhelming for everyone else.

Fifteen minutes on, forty-five off, is enough to keep a room scented and keep your nose able to notice it. It also makes a bottle of oil last roughly four times longer.

Match the scent to the room

Citrus and green notes read as clean, which is why they work in kitchens and bathrooms. Wood, amber and leather read as warm and settled, which suits a living room in the evening and feels heavy at breakfast. Bedrooms want something quiet enough that you stop noticing it, not something you are aware of while trying to sleep.

One scent through the whole house is simpler than it sounds and better than three fighting each other in a hallway.

What to do this week

1. Walk in through the front door after an hour out and write down what you smell.
2. Clear the drains, wash whatever fabric is nearest the smell, scrub the bin itself.
3. Open two windows on opposite walls for ten minutes.
4. Put a diffuser near a doorway or vent rather than in a corner, and run it in bursts.

Our waterless cold-air diffusers and 120ml fragrance oils are built for step four.