Bespoke gift idea wedding

Francis Kurkdjian and I are taking it in turns to smell his office furniture. We are in Paris, in his boardroom. "This is real leather," he says, sniffing the chair. "But it doesn't smell of leather." He moves over to the desk. "Imagine this being real wood. Waxed wood. You go to Ikea - everything smells like plastic. A hundred years ago you had no Ikea. You go to a furniture maker and it was like smelling wood and wax and things that had smells."

The lack of smells is really starting to get up his nose. "This whole room doesn't smell," he concludes, playing with his footballer's hair. "You want to make it warmer, you put in a smell."

But, I say, aren't we living in altogether smellier times than we were 100 years ago? These days, we can't breathe for oils and incenses and air fresheners. Kurkdjian looks quite cross. "This is terrible. It gets me sick. When I was in New York, most of the taxi drivers, they have this smelly cardboard tree in their car. It is strong and not subtle. The car is very small. After 15 minutes you leave the car, you smell like a vanilla bean. This is why I offer to people my service."

Kurkdjian is in the business of making smells. He's a createur de parfum, probably the best in the world. When he was 25, he made Le Male for Jean Paul Gaultier which, in turn, made his name. In France, it knocked Eau Savage off the number-one spot in the bestsmellers' list; a position it had occupied for 40 years. After that, he produced a whole Duty Free's worth of posh scents, among them Green Tea for Elizabeth Arden, Mania pour Homme for Giorgio Armani and Kouros Eau d'ete for Yves Saint Laurent.

Last summer, he set up on his own. Though he still does a bit of commercial work - one or two commissions a year for his parent company, and former employer, Quest International - he's far busier making perfumes for private customers. Bespoke smells. Kurkdjian's earlier successes mean that his prices aren't to be sniffed at. They start at pounds 1,400, though somewhere around pounds 5,000 is more likely with pounds 10,500 being his all-time priciest (that involved getting the smell of Tudor Rose right and Tudor Rose is "bloody expensive - more expensive than blood!").

Anyway, for your money you get eight bottles of your chosen perfume, in bronze glass to protect it from the sunlight, sealed with a silk cord fastener and embossed with your personal monogram. Of course, you don't have to have your scent in a bottle. After one of his clients came to him complaining about the smell of chlorine, Kurkdjian went to work on a scent for their swimming pool. Something a bit more "orange, flowery". "It took some time," he says. "There were some technological issues to get right." Then he made a private jet come up smelling of roses, and gave some christening water that little extra je ne sais quoi. When two of his best friends got married and Kurkdjian didn't like the look of the wedding list - "boring woks and knives" - he made them male and female versions of the same scent, designed to "come together like yin and yang, and the whole thing is complete".

You'll have spotted that Kurkdjian perfumes aren't for everybody. You might say they're the height of decadence. "Oh yes, they are!" he says, pleased. "I want it to be the ultimate luxury thing that people can buy. They have yachts, 10 cars, and huge apartments and villas, but I want this to be the crazy thing."

Kurkdjian didn't always know he was going to get into the scent business. He had his perfume epiphany when he was 13 or 14, playing with his sister who, as teenage girls do, had a little collection of perfume sample bottles. As is tradition, they were all lined up and dusty on a shelf. "She was into the bottles and I was into what was inside," he says. When Kurkdjian told his parents he had decided he was going to make perfumes for a living, they were greatly relieved. "Before that," he says, "I wanted to be a ballet dancer."

Twenty years ago there were 38 new launches in the fine perfume sector. Last year, there were 520. The companies that manufacture these scents aren't fashion houses like Hermes or Guerlain, the names that are printed on perfume bottles, but companies that are referred to in the industry as the "Big Five" - multinational behemoths such as Quest International or International Fragrance. These companies sell natural and synthetic essences that aromatise everything from yoghurts to car waxes. And, of course, perfumes.

The most famous auteur of fine perfumes in the 20th century was Edmond Roundnitska. He used to sit in his garden in Grasse - France's perfumery capital since the 1500s - and inhale essences under the shade of his big straw hat. In the 1950s and 1960s, he would dream up the smells that would come to define the jet-set lifestyle: Dior's Eau Fraiche, Diorissimo and, notably, Eau Sauvage, the scent that Serge Gainsbourg and Dean Martin wore. Some of Roundnitska's smells would take eight years to perfect.

These days, when the average large-scale perfume launch costs pounds 25 million, the marketing campaign, bottle and name of the fragrance are decided before the brief is even sent out to people such as Kurkdjian. In turn, these briefs will have been determined by committee, by hefty market research and focus groups.

Smell is the one sense scientists don't fully understand. We like to think that our choice of aftershave or perfume is down to emotive, personal reasons. In reality, like everything in fashion, there are more prosaic marketing reasons for a particular smell of success.

In the 1980s, when hosts of liberated Western women took charge of their sex lives for the first time, thick, heavy scents such as Giorgio and Obsession became hugely successful, while no male City broker worth his Beemer would be caught power-lunching without reeking of something manly such as Drakkar Noir. In the early 1990s, with androgyny and Aids on the agenda, subtle, sex-less scents such as Cal- vin Klein's Escape, cK One and L'eau d'Issey broke through, and Obsession's sales fell away.

Kurkdjian says he doesn't mind the limitations imposed on his creativity by the big fashion houses, when they ask him to come up with something, for example, "clean, bright and unisex". After all, they pay him handsomely. And, he says, "to be creative you have to have limits". But it's the personal commissions he really gets off on. "You get into a relationship with the client," he says. "It doesn't come at the first meeting, but it's very bizarre. I am like a psychologist. Many of these people are business people who, at the beginning, try to impress me. But once you talk about fragrance, all of a sudden you lose your airs. People talk to me about their father, their mother... why they argue with their brother."

Plus, he says, it's good fun making people happy. "You let people dream with you. It's like making them a gift. Like being good at cooking. And also I have people who say they met because of a fragrance. A man will tell a woman that she smells great and it's because of me. Sometimes I am like... Cupid?"

Right now, Kurkdjian has been asked to create a smell for an entire house. The idea is that, with scented waxes and candles, he'll be able to give each room its own aroma. All the smells will be different, but will be "harmoniously mixed in the air".

In the basement of the fine-fragrances wing of the huge Quest International building in Paris, there are two white laboratories. Filled with thousands and thousands of tiny glass bottles, they look like walk-in Damien Hirst cabinet installations. This is where the Willy Wonka magic happens. Once Kurkdjian has had his initial meeting with a client, he'll have some basic notes on the sort of scent they're after. How will they wear it? All the time as part of their personality? Or only at night for dinner engagements? Do they favour spicy smells? Or something lighter? Then he'll come down here and prepare a sample, so the client can go away and live with it for a while. After that, there's more to-ing and fro-ing. The whole process takes between four and six months.

Kurkdjian leans forward and picks out something from his miniature bottle library. It's labelled "Isoamyl Acetate". "Be careful," he says. He removes the stopper and waves it under my nose. It is, unmistakably, bubble gum. "That's right," he says. He chooses something else. "It's orange," he says. "From Florida." The room seems to fill with the smell of summer orchards. Another bottle is "somewhere between pear and white bread". Yet another is simultaneously fruity and metallic, "Like a mixture of pineapple and iron," says Kurkdjian. "The smell of an iron on clothes."

Kurkdjian says that God didn't bless him with a particularly gifted nose. "No. My nose is very bad," he says. "I smoke, I drink, I go out." He says he doesn't wear a special scent himself. "I smell of cigarettes. Everyone in Paris smokes."