In the world of fragrance, we speak of the top note and the base note and the dry down. A scent starts as a bright burst of citrus or mint and it smells like a summer morning in a garden. You spray it on a card in a clean lab and you think it is a masterpiece. But the skin of a human is not a card. The skin is warm and the skin has oils and the skin has a history.

After four hours the citrus is gone and the base note remains. Sometimes that base note smells like damp earth or old metal and the masterpiece is a failure. I am Aiden J.-P. and I evaluate these scents for a living. I once sat in a room with a chemist and he told a joke about molecular distillation and I did not understand the joke but I laughed anyway.

I pretended to understand because I wanted the meeting to end and I wanted to go home. We make many choices because they look good in the bright light of a meeting and we ignore how they will smell or look when the sun goes down and the real world begins.

The Sterile Elegance of the Lyon Swatch

A manager sits in an office in Lyon or Paris and he looks at a sample of stone or wood. The sample is small and it is clean. It sits on a desk of glass and the light comes from the ceiling and there is no wind and there is no rain. The manager touches the surface and it feels smooth and he sees the color is a pale cream.

He thinks of the word “prestige” and he thinks of the word “light” and he signs the paper. He has approved the material for the new park benches. He has seen the swatch and he is happy.

But the cleaner arrives at six in the morning and the air is cold and the park is not an office. He sees the pale cream benches and he sees the marks of the night. A child dropped a red ice cream and the sugar has dried into the stone. A bird flew over and left a white streak and the streak has baked under the sun.

A man sat with a newspaper and the ink has transferred to the seat. The cleaner has a bucket and he has a rag and he has a brush. He scrubs the stone and the water turns grey and the stone stays stained.

A Personal Dry Down Failure

I made this mistake once with a linen suit. I was in Morocco and I wanted to look like a man who understood the desert. I chose a suit the color of bleached sand. It was a beautiful suit in the shop in London. I wore it for one hour in the heat and I sat on a wooden chair and the oil of the wood stained the trousers.

I walked through a market and the dust of the earth turned the hem into a dark ring. I looked like a man who had fallen into a hole. I thought the suit would stay like the swatch but the suit lived in the world and the world won. I was wrong about the material and I was wrong about the color.

The Seven Secrets of the Failed Material

The wood begins to drink the rain. It drinks the spilled soda and it drinks the grease of the street. This lead us to the third secret: the chemistry of the sugar bond. Public spaces are sticky places. People spill things and the things they spill are full of sugar and chemicals. On a non-porous material the liquid sits on top. On a fashionable stone or a soft wood the liquid enters the grain and it stays there forever.

Then there is the sixth secret: the aging paradox. Some materials age with grace and they become silver or they become dark and they look better for it. But a pale, polished surface does not age. It only decays. It goes from perfect to grubby and there is no middle ground.

Finally, the seventh secret is the cost of the ego. We choose materials that make us look sophisticated in the moment of the decision. We do not choose materials that respect the time of the person who must maintain them.

I look for seating that does not fear the bird or the berry or the cigarette. Bio Jardins provides solutions that consider the life of the object. They offer models like the AGORA and the AVENUE and the ATLANTIC and they know that a park is a battlefield of elements. They use materials like Govaplast which is a recycled plastic that does not have pores.

It does not drink the soda and it does not hold the ink. It is a solid material and it is dense and it is tough. The AGORA bench sits in a square and the sun beats down and the rain falls but the material does not rot and it does not stain. The manager can approve it because it looks modern and the cleaner can love it because he only needs a damp cloth.

This is the balance that the swatch usually hides. We need durable outdoor furniture solutions by Bio Jardins because they have looked past the first ten minutes of the meeting. They have looked at the tenth year of the bench.

The Honest Bench of Grasse

I remember a bench in a garden in Grasse. It was a metal bench and it was painted a dark, deep green. It had been there for forty years. The paint was thick and it was smooth. I sat on it and I smelled the jasmine in the air. The bench did not try to be a cloud or a piece of jewelry.

It was a place to sit and it was clean. The gardener told me he washed it once a month with a hose. He did not need a chemical peel or a wire brush. He liked the bench because the bench was honest.

We are often seduced by the “Canvas” model of a new project. We want a blank slate. We want the world to be as clean as our intentions. But the world is full of carbon and salt and human hands. If we choose a material that demands perfection we are creating a future of failure.

The cleaner knows this. He knows the geography of every stain on the “Bonn” model or the “Atlantic” model if they are not specified correctly. He knows which corners hold the sand and which slats trap the leaves.

“When I evaluate a fragrance I wait for the eight-hour mark. I want to know what is left when the party is over. We should do the same with our streets.”

We should take the swatch and we should rub it with dirt and we should pour coffee on it and we should leave it in the sun. If it still looks like something we want to sit on then we can sign the paper. If it turns into a map of misery then we should put it back in the box.

The manager and the architect and the project leader have a responsibility to the person with the bucket. A beautiful park is not a park that looked good on the day of the opening ceremony. A beautiful park is a park that looks good on a Tuesday morning in November when the rain is falling and the trees are bare and the benches are still clean.

The material is the soul of the object. If the material is fragile the soul is anxious. If the material is resilient the soul is at peace. We should seek the peace of the non-porous and the strength of the recycled core. We should listen to the man who knows what the material hides because he is the one who has to find it every morning at dawn.