JAN BARBA

JAN BARBA is a Warsaw perfume house co-founded by Bartosz Puzio, its chief executive and perfumer; his brother Piotr later joined to look after foreign perfumeries. The company began in 2015 as a body-care brand using herbal extracts. Perfume was a side project for about three years before the first two scents, Superiore and Chypre, came out, and the house dates its perfumes from 2018. It later dropped cosmetics to work on perfume alone.

Bartosz Puzio is self-taught and a member of the British Society of Perfumers. Every scent is an original composition, made by hand in the house's laboratory at Cybulice Małe, near Czosnów, just outside Warsaw. A scent can take weeks or months to develop, and the whole team smells and judges it before release. Ideas come from a book, a place, a painting or an ingredient. Since late 2023 some scents mix natural materials with aroma molecules, starting with AIYOKU and OLYMPIA.

JAN BARBA sells from its own perfumery at ul. Kopernika 25 in Śródmieście, central Warsaw. It opens from midday on Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, with a short lunch break, and is closed on Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday, so check the hours before you go. The current range is six eaux de toilette and a sample set. Try TABADIN first: it grew out of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's Wind, Sand and Stars, his book about flying over the Sahara, and shows how the house turns a book into a scent.