Bortnikoff

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History of the house

Bortnikoff grew out of distillation before it became a perfume house. Its founder, Dmitry Bortnikoff, is an architect by training and a perfumer by vocation, of Russian origin. In 2013 he co-founded Feel-Oud, a company devoted to distilling some of the finest agarwood and sandalwood oils, and it was this hands-on mastery of raw materials that made an independent house possible.

According to the house itself, Bortnikoff was founded in 2018 in Thailand, where the founder had direct access to agarwood and the means to distil oud on the ground. The brand is therefore Russian through its founder but rooted in Southeast Asia for its materials, a configuration it shares with a small group of contemporary artisanal oud houses.

From the start, the house defined itself by the concentration of naturals. Each perfume contains between 95 and 100 percent natural ingredients, many of the oils are distilled in-house, and the compositions combine traditional nineteenth-century distillation techniques with a contemporary sense of structure. Early releases such as Oud Maximus (2018) and Oud Monarch (2019) set the tone: dense oud framed by multiple rose oils and rare spices.

The catalogue is organised into collections, including dedicated ouds, a main collection, colognes and attars, and the house works on a limited-series logic where each composition is presented as unrepeatable. Several references are produced in restricted quantities and are not re-released identically, which has built the brand's reputation in the ultra-confidential segment of natural oud perfumery.

Notable perfumes

The Bortnikoff catalogue is built on in-house distilled oud and rare naturals, released in limited series across several collections. The references below are recurring anchors identified through the official site and reference databases. Numbered re-distillations and yearly variants are not listed separately.

Olfactive signature

The Bortnikoff signature is the signature of its raw materials. The house works primarily with in-house distilled oud, drawn from several origins, and frames it with rose oils, rare spices and other naturals. Because each composition is 95 to 100 percent natural and built on a high concentration of distilled oils, the perfumes are dense, deep and persistent, with the texture of a material rather than a constructed accord.

Oud is the organising centre of the catalogue. Around it the house builds variations: oud and multiple roses, oud and tobacco, oud and animalic musk, in compositions where the number of components can be high but the naturals dominate. The traditional distillation heritage, explicitly claimed by the house, gives the work a craft dimension that synthetic-led oud perfumery cannot replicate.

The second defining trait is scarcity. The limited-series model means that compositions are produced in restricted quantities, presented as unrepeatable and often unavailable once a batch is gone. This logic of rarity, combined with in-house distillation, is what places Bortnikoff among the references of contemporary artisanal oud perfumery.

A house where the perfume begins at the still: oud distilled by the founder's own hand, then composed.

Key characteristics

The house today

Bortnikoff remains an independent, ultra-confidential house, with no acquisition by a larger group publicly documented. Dmitry Bortnikoff continues to direct the brand as founder, distiller and author of the compositions, supported by the distillation expertise developed through Feel-Oud. The house operates from Southeast Asia, where it sources and distils its agarwood.

Distribution stays deliberately limited. The primary channel is the official site, where perfumes appear in restricted series, and only a handful of specialist retailers occasionally hold stock. For collectors of natural oud, Bortnikoff sits alongside houses such as Ensar Oud and Areej Le Doré as a reference for in-house distilled, high-concentration artisanal perfumery, addressed to a small and committed audience.

Frequently asked questions

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