Featured image: Addison Colvin
While each season has its glories, for me summer wears the crown. With ripe fruits and long days there’s plenty of sensory activation to enjoy during those three hot, lazy months. But, what summer “smells like” to me has changed over the years.
As a young child in rural Maryland, summer smelled like cherry popsicles, riding my bike past wild honeysuckle, chlorinated water rushing into hot white pavement at the community pool, my older sister’s Coppertone body oil. As a teenager, summer smelled like bales of fresh hay in the field near my house, the ones we would sit on as we watched the fireflies fill the grass at dusk, the humid air plush around us, the setting sun seeming to set the sky on fire. I couldn’t wait to leave the smallness of that town. If you’d asked me then what that moment smelled like to me I would have said impending freedom… and the hope of something more.
I moved to southern California after graduation and spent most of the next two decades there. Of course, it is virtually ‘year-round summer,’ in that part of the country, and yes, there are scents to be revered: sunny citrus, intoxicating night-blooming jasmine, the brine of the ocean breeze. But a funny thing happened (as pretty much every adult in my life predicted): I missed the seasons. I missed the humidity. And, by God, I missed the fireflies.
But fate is a funny thing.
At the end 2020, I found myself moving to middle Tennessee after having only visited the state exactly one time. I’d heard the people were nice and the weather was mild, and at that particular point in my life that was all I needed. Spring tornado season was a little more than I bargained for, but summer came with its own unexpected treasures.
I was sitting on my porch early in May when I saw them for the first time. It had been years since I’d seen them in person, and at first I thought my mind was playing tricks on me. But then there it was again… a single glowing light in the dark, then another, until the yard was filled with fireflies blinking their silent song. Without realizing it, and after a long circuitous journey, I had somehow made my way back home.
By mid-July, I was celebrating Southern Summer like it was a new religion. I stopped at roadside farm stands to inhale tomato stems. I’d steal long breaths of freshly-shucked corn, bite into sweet peaches that had never known refrigeration and shamelessly let the juice run down my chin. I’d drive home with a cache of sun-warmed blackberries on my lap and mostly arrive with nothing left but an empty paper container. Most evenings you could find me on my porch with a glass of sun-tea waiting for the light show to begin. It was on one of those occasions that I began to wonder if you couldn’t just bottle this moment, this feeling, of a sticky Southern summer watching the fireflies. What would that smell like, I wondered. I imagined it as something that would embody the warmth of the season, and feel both nostalgic and timeless at the same time.
In it’s creepy way, Instagram recently served me an ad that seem to mirror my thoughts. There it was on my feed: The image of a woman wearing a sundress amidst a gauzy haze of humidity, holding a golden yellow bottle. Summer Street. A new fragrance from House of Brandt.
I’m something of a fragrance enthusiast and had recently started The Olfactory Edit account on Instagram where I share my love of all things scented, so getting this type of targeted ad wasn’t completely out of left field. Still, it unnerved me. I clicked the ad and couldn’t believe what I was reading. “Summer Street welcomes you into the bliss of saturated summers past, soaked in the dreamy glow of golden hour, and invites you to slip into your favorite memory, when the air was rich with honeysuckle, and the evenings were lit by fireflies.” I couldn’t add it to my cart fast enough.
When my package arrived and I applied Summer Street to my skin, it had all the nostalgic warmth I had hoped for. With opening notes of blackberry and apricot jam, middle notes of jasmine and honeysuckle, and a warm vanilla and benzoin dry down, the fragrance somehow smelled plush in the way that humidity does. The scent wasn’t heavy or cloying in any way, or overly sweet or fruity… it was just soft, sensual, and glowing–like a memory, or the feeling of watching fireflies.
Intrigued, I reached out to House of Brandt’s creative director, Elizabeth Grace, on Instagram. Surely she and I are kindred spirits, right? I had to know how she got her inspiration for Summer Street and the story behind how it came to life.
“Nostalgic summer is so subjective,” she told me. “But I just remembered how being a kid, everything felt so saturated. It was warm and golden… and of course there were fireflies.”
Elizabeth grew up near Memphis and spent her summers on a few rolling green acres before moving to Nashville to attend college. She too had an affinity for fragrance since a very young age, experiencing the world through scent much like I did. As a creative outlet, she started an Instagram account centered around her love of perfume. She’d amassed over 10,000 followers when her account was inexplicably deleted. “It was devastating, “ she says. “But everything happens for a reason.”
Rightfully disillusioned by Instagram, Elizabeth decided to try a new medium: TikTok. “It’s so casual over there, I just kind of posted whatever I wanted.” As her A Room With Perfume audience grew (now at over 70,000 followers), her husband was simultaneously discovering his own love of fragrance by osmosis. “Will (Brandt) got bit by the fragrance bug too and it became this thing we loved and discovered together. He’s an entrepreneur at heart and knew he wanted to start a business. As he fell more in love with fragrance, starting a business around that seemed like the obvious choice.”
House of Brandt was founded in Nashville in 2023. The brand has had a few viral releases to date, including London Fog and Guava Sorbet. Elizabeth’s experience in the fragrance industry helps her understand what consumers are wanting and maybe aren’t getting, but she says House of Brandt is about more than filling an industry hole. “The brand ethos is all about creating scents that evoke memory and connotation… we want to create scents that transport you to a time and place, or a feeling.” I assure her that with Summer Street, they have done just that.
“That makes me so happy to hear. You never know how people are going to respond, it’s quite nerve-racking!” she laughs.
“Will and I talked endlessly about saturation. Just that hazy feeling of summer when the air feels thick and warm and golden. When I think of summer I think of stone fruits, but I never liked peach in fragrance. So, that’s where I thought let’s try apricot jam. The main thing for me was that I wanted Summer Street to feel like a progression. Like you start in one place and end in another from a sensory perspective.”
I can attest that Summer Street does indeed achieve that feeling of progression. It starts with a soft fruity (but not overly sweet) apricot jam note and ends up with a resinous vanilla plushness that has excellent longevity. “Summer Street is kind of in its own category. I’d say it’s an amber, fruity floral,” explains Elizabeth. She also teased that House of Brandt is currently working on a new fragrance release for 2026. “It’s a lot of testing and going back and forth with our perfumer at the moment. But we are really excited about this one.”
I’m excited to see what House of Brandt does in the future. But for now, I’ll keep applying Summer Street. We are in the dog days of summer here in the South, and I want to soak up every juicy, glowing moment.
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