Aedes de Venustas

Quick answers

History of the house

Aedes de Venustas opened in March 1995 at 15 Christopher Street, in the West Village of New York (United States), when Karl Bradl and Robert Gerstner turned a small Greenwich Village storefront into the first New York boutique dedicated to niche fragrance.

The name comes from a Latin phrase that the partners glossed as a temple of beauty, with aedes for house or temple and venustas for grace, the root tied to Venus. The opening assortment was anchored by L'Artisan Parfumeur, then a confidential French brand barely distributed in the United States, and slowly widened to Diptyque, Annick Goutal, Creed, Serge Lutens, Comme des Garçons and other European houses that had no other American foothold at the time. For a decade and a half, the boutique was where a generation of American perfume readers first encountered European niche perfumery.

A first co-signed project arrived in 2005 with a home fragrance produced with L'Artisan Parfumeur, followed in 2008 by a fragrance also named Aedes de Venustas in the same partnership. The full in-house perfume line came in 2012, seventeen years after the boutique opened, when Bradl and Gerstner commissioned Bertrand Duchaufour to compose what would become Aedes de Venustas Eau de Parfum, also called Signature. The brief, in their own words to Duchaufour, was that they loved dark fragrances and incense; the perfumer answered with a rhubarb and incense composition that broke with the classical fragrance pyramid.

Bradl and Gerstner later moved the boutique down the same street to 9 Christopher Street, then in 2016 to a larger space at 7 Greenwich Avenue, and in 2018 across town to 16A Orchard Street on the Lower East Side. The retail thread and the editorial perfume line have remained held by the same two founders, who continue to act as creative directors of the in-house collection while running the boutique as a working selector of European niche houses.

Aedes de Venustas operates from 16A Orchard Street on the Lower East Side of New York, where the boutique moved in 2018, and from the official aedes.com web store. The house has remained independent since the 2012 launch.

Notable perfumes

The Aedes de Venustas catalog gathers twelve perfumes, thirteen with Sueño Latino (2025). The table below lists the seven creations reintroduced when the collection relaunched in November 2021, plus five other perfumes from the catalog.

Iris Nazarena won the Fragrance Foundation Award for Perfume Extraordinaire of the Year in 2014, and Pelargonium won the Russian FIFI Fragrance Award in the Unique Niche category in 2017.

Olfactory signature

Aedes de Venustas writes a European author perfumery in an American setting. The catalog revisits the classical codes of European niche, floral, chypre, iris, incense, leather and resinous wood, and reads them through guest perfumers drawn principally from the French and German rosters of Givaudan, Firmenich, Mane and Robertet. The founders' taste, openly stated as a preference for dark fragrances and incense, runs through almost every release. A flamboyant and baroque sensibility runs through every Aedes de Venustas scent, most of which center on rare botanicals and incense and often revolve around a single vegetal muse.

Three stylistic axes structure the line. The first is a resinous incense axis, anchored by Aedes de Venustas Signature (2012, Bertrand Duchaufour) and Copal Azur (2014, Bertrand Duchaufour), where a Mayan or Mediterranean reading of incense leads the composition. The second is a contemporary iris and floral axis, illustrated by Iris Nazarena (2013, Ralf Schwieger) and Pelargonium (2017, Nathalie Feisthauer), where a single floral or rooted material is built into a transparent woody base. The third is a precious wood axis, carried by Palissandre d'Or (Alberto Morillas) and later releases that lean on rosewood, vetiver and soft oud.

The editorial pacing is slow by current niche standards. The house has shipped roughly one composition a year since 2012, with no flanker series and no celebrity lines. The choice mirrors the curation logic of the boutique, which has always selected the houses it carries rather than absorbing whatever the market produces. For a guest perfumer, a brief from Aedes de Venustas reads as an invitation to write a single dense composition rather than a marketing exercise around an existing line.

A New York boutique that grew into a small European-style perfume house, with guest composers writing one careful chapter at a time.

Key characteristics

Frequently asked questions

See also