The Xuelei Fragrance Museum in Guangzhou, designed by Shenzhen Huahui Design in collaboration with Leaping Creative, transforms years of accumulated fragrance research and brand heritage into an immersive spatial experience where scent serves as the primary narrative thread.
While most spatial design begins with the visual, this newly opened fragrance museum takes a different approach—centring scent as its core language, redefining the relationship between people and space, culture and perception.
Built within the existing architectural framework, the design team used “the flow and diffusion of scent” as the guiding concept, translating invisible olfactory trajectories into legible spatial circulation. As natural light shifts throughout the day, the space takes on a flowing, continuous narrative rhythm—light and scent interweave, creating an atmosphere thats difficult to put into words.
Spanning six floors, the museum houses nearly 20 exhibition zones, over 50 interactive installations, and more than 300 scent-sampling stations. Visitors no longer passively observe—they engage through breathing, choice, and memory in a reinterpretation of civilisation itself. From the smoke of ancient rituals to the precision of modern perfumery, scent becomes the invisible thread linking history, humanity, and nature.
The architectural form draws inspiration from the perfume still, reimagining this historical object in a contemporary language. The design deliberately preserves vast expanses of open space, positioning the atrium as a central “vessel of light.” Natural illumination cascades from above, moving between curved walls and the spiral staircase, giving the ground floor a sense of transparency and weightlessness—a subtle echo of scents invisible yet omnipresent nature.
The most iconic feature is the AI perfume-blending installation that spans five storeys. Transparent vessels containing fragrance essences are arranged vertically along the staircase, serving both as a visual anchor and as a convergence point for data and scent. Upon entry, each visitor receives a “Scent Card” to sample and rate fragrances across various zones. The system collects preference data in real time, ultimately generating a bespoke fragrance on the ground floor. This transformation—from sensory experience to tangible object—ensures the visit extends beyond the moment, becoming a keepsake memory.
The exhibition content traverses East and West, past and present. “Origins of Scent” traces fragrances connection to the divine in ancient civilisations; “Ancient Chinese Incense” presents the spiritual dimensions of Chinas incense culture; and “Global Perfume History” charts the evolution of the modern perfume industry. Within the space of a breath, visitors complete a sensory reading of civilisations history.
The fourth-floor “Synaesthesia” gallery is particularly captivating. Through carefully designed interactive installations, scent is translated into touch, sound, taste, and colour: you can “feel” the texture of a fragrance, experience the rise and fall of scent notes through sound frequencies, and even rediscover the relationship between food and memory through the interplay of taste and smell. These cross-sensory experiments not only expand the boundaries of olfaction but also invite visitors to reconsider the very structure of perception itself.
The museum also features a café area with no solid partition walls—only staggered seating zones that allow natural light to flow freely indoors, making light and shadow the most dynamic element of the space. The retail zone, meanwhile, uses translucent blocks of high-luminosity colour to highlight product displays within an otherwise neutral space, evoking the bright, buoyant quality of a perfumes top notes and setting the tone for the visitors shopping experience.
Photo courtesy of Leaping Creative
