The Architecture of Smell: Designing with the Invisible Sense

Take one step into a bakery at dawn, a pine forest after rain, or a cedar-clad sauna in winter—and your entire body responds. You feel it. Even before your eyes can adjust or your fingers trace the texture of a surface, smell has already transported you somewhere.

In this third post of our Sensory Architecture series, we explore the olfactory world—one of the most overlooked yet powerful dimensions in the design of buildings and cities. Smell is invisible, often fleeting, yet it lingers in memory. It has the power to attract or repel, to comfort or alert, and to root us in place more deeply than sight or sound ever could.

And yet, most buildings are designed to eliminate smell rather than embrace it.

Forgotten Atmospheres

Contemporary architecture often aims to be neutral, hygienic, and scentless. Conditioned air, chemical cleaning products, off-gassing plastics, synthetic fragrances, and tightly sealed environments have replaced the more nuanced smells of natural materials, fresh air, earth, timber, and time.

We have sterilised buildings to the point where they no longer breathe. In doing so, we have lost something important: character, memory, and emotion.

This is not just about nostalgia. Olfactory design plays a powerful role in how we perceive a space. Studies have shown that smell is the sense most closely linked to memory. A certain scent can summon entire chapters of our past—where we were, who we were with, what we felt. This emotional architecture has the potential to create deeper bonds between people and place.

Smell as a Spatial Cue

Smell is not only emotive—it is also spatial. Like light and shadow, smell can define boundaries, zones, and rhythms. Think of the entrance to a florist, a school corridor after lunch, or the moment the smell of salt air tells you the ocean is near.

In homes, the transition from one room to another can be subtly marked by scent—timber in the living room, linen in the bedrooms, herbs from the kitchen. These are not artificial insertions but the by-products of natural materials, open-air movement, and human activity.

Designing with smell does not mean masking one scent with another, or pumping fragrance through a space. It means curating the ingredients of space—material, ventilation, vegetation, moisture, orientation—to allow honest, evocative scents to emerge and mingle.

Material Memory

Natural materials offer their own scent stories. A house built from macrocarpa or cedar will tell you so every time it warms in the sun. Lime plaster smells different to acrylic paint. Raw wool, unvarnished timber, beeswax, leather—all have scent profiles that contribute to a sense of comfort and authenticity.

These are the materials of soulful architecture. They do not off-gas; they age. They hold a patina of time and use, and their scent becomes part of a space’s emotional register.

When we specify synthetic materials—especially in tightly sealed buildings—we often replace these subtle natural notes with VOCs, artificial fragrances, or, worse, a vague sense of staleness.

Biophilic design is not only about the visual greening of space. It is also about reintroducing sensory richness. Smell is a part of that. Gardens near windows, openable skylights, roof decks, courtyards, planted balconies—these invite in the outdoor air, the scent of flowers, rain, soil, and seasons.

Designing for Scent in the City

In urban design, smell plays a role in how alive and safe a city feels. Smell maps can reveal zones of activity, decay, hospitality, or transport. The smoky sizzle of food carts, the tang of wet asphalt, the resinous smell of sunlit pine bark in a small pocket park—these contribute to a sense of aliveness.

Contrast this with sterile shopping centres or underground walkways that reek of disinfectant or carry no scent at all. These places feel lifeless not because they lack form or function, but because they lack soul.

In Auckland, and cities like it, we need to consider smell as part of urban renewal. Not to eradicate odour, but to curate olfactory experiences that support wellbeing. Planting decisions, material selections, urban agriculture, pedestrian movement—all can contribute to a city that smells like life.

A More Honest Architecture

To design with smell is to design with honesty. To allow materials to breathe. To permit spaces to reflect their use. To welcome in the air, the weather, the natural world. It is about trust—trusting that people can handle the complexity of real experience, not a sanitised simulation of it.

At Daedal, we believe that soulful architecture is never sterile. It is textured, seasonal, inhabited—and yes, sometimes scented.

Whether it is the sun-warmed wood of a veranda, the sharp citrus of crushed kawakawa underfoot, or the faint smoky trace of last night’s fire, smell matters.

And when the smell of a building lingers in your clothes long after you leave, that is not a fault. That is memory at work.