Apothecary cabinetry and a mortar dating to 1552 remain on display at Antica Farmacia Pesci (dal 1552), now housed beside Rome's Trevi fountain. The pharmacy moved into Palazzo Castellani in 1911, preserving older fittings within its later address. London perfumery is represented by Atkinsons, the business James Atkinson established in 1799. In St James's, D.R. Harris has traded as a chemist since 1790, with Arlington among its named house fragrances.
Among Rome's oldest pharmacies, founded 1552 by Andrea and Vincenzo Pesci; since 1911 housed at Piazza di Trevi 89 in the Palazzo Castellani, with original 16th-century apothecary cabinetry and a 1552 mortar still on display.
Best for Five-century apothecary remedies.
Antica Farmacia Pesci opened in 1552 as a spezieria (apothecary), founded at the pope's behest to distribute medicines to the poor of the neighborhood, and is credited as the oldest pharmacy in Rome. It was established by Andrea and Vincenzo Pesci before management passed to the Del Monaco family. Its location has moved twice: originally sited opposite the Acqua Vergine fountain in 1552, it relocated to Piazza Trevi in 1609, and moved into its current premises in 1911 - the ground floor of the nineteenth-century Palazzo Castellani at Piazza di Trevi 89, a few steps from the Trevi Fountain. The pharmacy has preserved its historic interior: dark wood cabinetry lined with antique boxes and jars, and a mortar dated to the shop's founding year of 1552.
James Atkinson established his London perfume business in 1799; 24 Old Bond Street was its historic address, not its current door.
Best for London perfumery since 1799, the bear-and-crown house revived on Old Bond Street
Atkinsons was founded in London in 1799 by James Atkinson, who arrived from Cumberland carrying his own recipes for toiletries and fragrances, and was soon joined by his brother Edward; the pair manufactured their early lines at the Eonia Works in Rotherhithe. Their signature product, a bear-grease hair pomade marketed on claims that it could stimulate hair regrowth, remained a bestseller into the First World War and gave the house its enduring chained-bear emblem. In 1832 James Atkinson was appointed Perfumer to the Court of St. James, and the firm received a Royal Warrant from King George IV; documented clients from this period include the Duke of Wellington, Admiral Lord Nelson, Beau Brummell and Sarah Bernhardt, alongside assorted European royalty. The brand passed through several owners in the early twenty-first century before the Italian fragrance house Perfume Holding acquired it from Procter & Gamble in 2008 and relaunched it in September 2013 as Atkinsons 1799, rebuilding the range around its Bond Street origin story while manufacturing and distributing from Italy. No dedicated Atkinsons-operated boutique currently appears in the brand's own store locator or in independent retail listings; the perfumes are instead distributed through multi-brand perfumeries and department stores across Europe.
Trudon traces its story to 1643, when Claude Trudon took over a shop on rue Saint Honore in Paris selling spices and candles. In 1737 Jerome Trudon bought the Royal Wax Manufacture at Antony, which supplied the Imperial court by 1811. The scented candles were born in 2007 and the first five perfumes followed in 2017. Candles are made in the house's Normandy workshop, and the Paris shop stands at 78 rue de Seine.
Best for The world’s oldest candles
Cire Trudon traces its origins to 1643, when Claude Trudon opened a shop on Paris's rue Saint-Honoré selling wax and candles for domestic and ecclesiastical use. His son Jacques joined the royal court at Versailles in 1687 as apothecary and distiller to Queen Marie-Thérèse, and the family's wax business grew alongside its court connections; Louis XIV later elevated Charles Trudon to the French nobility. In 1737 Jérôme Trudon purchased a large wax factory in Antony, in what is now Hauts-de-Seine, where more than a hundred workers once labored — the building survives today, listed on France's inventory of historical monuments. The house supplied candles for the royal chapel at Versailles and continued serving the court through the Ancien Régime and the Revolution; even during his imprisonment, Louis XVI is recorded as having used Trudon candles. The engineer Duhamel du Monceau praised the family's craftsmanship in his 1762 encyclopedia. Cire Trudon still supplies the Paris church of Saint-Roch, lit by its candles continuously since 1643. Its headquarters and flagship boutique now sit at 78 rue de Seine in Paris's sixth arrondissement, a few streets from the house's original rue Saint-Honoré premises, and the maison markets itself today as the oldest surviving candlemaker in France.
Family-owned perfume house founded in London in 1760 by James Henry Creed; relocated to Paris in 1854 at the request of Empress Eugenie. Still led by the Creed family, now in its seventh generation.
Best for Aventus and Green Irish Tweed.
The House of Creed traces to 1760, when James Henry Creed established himself in London as a tailor whose scented gloves and waters seduced the court; Empress Eugénie's patronage drew the firm to Paris in 1854, and the family has compounded fragrances ever since — seven generations, each master handing the organ to the next, royal warrants collecting like sediment — George III commissioned Royal English Leather in 1781, and Jasmin Impératrice Eugénie still carries the empress's name. The original London rooms stood on Conduit Street.
Olivier Creed, sixth generation, wrote the modern legend: Green Irish Tweed in 1985 — the fresh fougère a thousand colognes imitate — and Aventus in 2010, the pineapple-and-birch juggernaut that became the most influential men's fragrance of its era, its batch variations debated online like wine vintages. Millésime concentration, hand-weighed ingredients, and origin stories starring kings and film stars complete the mythology.
Kering Beauté acquired the house in 2023 for a sum reported near €3.5 billion — its founding purchase — with Olivier's son Erwin representing the seventh generation. The boutiques, Paris's above all, sell perfumery's rarest asset: continuity you can smell.
Creed boutique at Dubai Mall; the house traces to London in 1760 under James Henry Creed, is now Anglo-French and Paris-based, and is best known for its top-selling fragrance, Aventus.
Best for Heritage French niche fragrances.
This location is a Creed boutique at The Dubai Mall - one of several UAE outposts for the brand alongside a store at Mall of the Emirates. Creed traces its founding to London in 1760, when James Henry Creed established a tailoring house serving British nobility; company lore holds that a pair of scented leather gloves was presented to King George III around that period, marking the brand's move into perfumery. Today Creed operates as an Anglo-French niche perfume house based in Paris, with boutiques across cities including London, New York, Paris, Sydney, and Dubai. Its best-known fragrance, Aventus, launched decades after the brand's founding and remains its top seller.
D.R. Harris has traded as a chemist in St James's, London, since 1790 and holds a Royal Warrant. Arlington, its house fragrance, remains a signature at the same address.
Best for Since 1790, Arlington, and the Queen's chemist.
Produced in Cologne since at least 1799 and allowed the geographical indication Original Eau de Cologne; the original store at Glockengasse 4 is the walk-in house (Wikipedia; koeln.de).
Farina 1709 is a Cologne house for eau de Cologne, fragrance, soaps and scented gifts. Founded in 1709; Made in Cologne; International shipping is available.
Best for Eau de Cologne, fragrance, soaps and scented gifts
Johann Maria Farina distilled the first Eau de Cologne here in 1709, and eight generations of the Farina family have kept making it to the same guarded recipe of bergamot, lemon and neroli. Guided tours of the fragrance museum trace the perfume's court history, and an atelier workshop lets visitors blend and bottle their own 50 ml flacon.
Best for Original Eau de Cologne and fragrance history
Johann Maria Farina founded this Cologne house in 1709, still producing the original Eau de Cologne to a closely guarded formula of citrus and Mediterranean botanicals. The Obenmarspforten atelier combines a working perfumery with a museum on the scent's history, plus workshops where visitors blend and bottle their own 50ml cologne.
Best for Original Eau de Cologne, perfumery museum and blending workshops
The Rome outpost of Florence's apothecary, founded by Dominican monks in 1612. Santa Maria Novella produces exquisite perfumes, colognes, skincare, and home fragrances using traditional form.
Best for Florence's apothecary (1612) — Dominican formulas in dark wood and marble splendor.
Florentine apothecary founded in 1561 by Domenico Brunetti, a guild-registered pharmacist, on Via dei Servi in a building owned by the nuns of San Niccolo. Run by the Azzerlini family since 1970; opened a second Florence store on Via Porta Rossa in 2018. Makes fragrances, home scents and skincare.
Best for Historic Florentine skincare.
Farmacia SS. Annunziata's history is dated to 1561, when Domenico Brunetti - registered three years earlier in Florence's Guild of Physicians and Pharmacists - opened an apothecary on Via dei Servi, in a building belonging to the nuns of San Niccolo near the Duomo. The shop originally sold medicinal herbs and prepared remedies. The Azzerlini family has run the business since 1970, and in June 2018 opened a second Florence location on Via Porta Rossa. Today the house makes fragrances, home scents, diffusers and candles, and skincare and body-care lines, some still produced to older galenic formulas associated with its pharmacy origins.
London perfumer founded in 1730 by Juan Famenias Floris, a Minorca-born barber and perfumer, at 89 Jermyn Street, where the family still runs the business and its perfumery from the same shop, now in its 8th and 9th generations.
Best for Heritage English colognes, No.89, White Rose and bespoke fragrances.
Perfumer to the crown since 1730 — English florals composed in London for very nearly three centuries, with No.89 carrying the house scent forward decade after decade. Heritage English cologne is a small category with one obvious address; Floris has been that address since before the word "cologne" settled into English.
Grasse since 1747 — among perfume’s oldest houses, where visitors compose their own scent. In 1996 Galimard opened a public Perfume Creation Atelier so visitors compose their own scent; a further Studio des Fragrances opened in Eze in 2007.
Best for Compose-your-own-scent workshops at one of Grasse's oldest perfume houses, since 1747.
Galimard has been perfuming Grasse, the historic capital of French fragrance, since 1747, making it one of the town's oldest continuously operating perfume houses. The workshop's core offering has always been hands-on: visitors compose a personal eau de parfum from an organ of roughly 126 raw materials, guided through the architecture of top, middle and base notes before bottling and taking home a finished 100ml fragrance, with the formula saved so it can be reordered later. What began as a single Grasse operation has grown into a genuine multi-branch house — the original Grasse workshop at 73 route de Cannes, a coastal outpost in Eze, and a Paris boutique and atelier at 43 rue de Provence in the 9th arrondissement, a short walk from the Chaussee d'Antin-La Fayette and Notre-Dame-de-Lorette metro stations. The Paris location runs the same composition workshops as Grasse, priced from roughly 15 euros for an accompanying adult up to 89 euros for a full 100ml creation, making the house's craft accessible without requiring a trip to Provence. Across every branch, the emphasis stays on traditional techniques and Grasse's own flower fields that first gave the town its reputation as the world's perfume capital.
Paris perfume house founded in 2000 by Gérald Ghislain, a former restaurateur who trained at the ISIPCA perfumery school from 1997; names its fragrances for the birth years of historical figures — 1725 Casanova, 1873 Colette, 1876 Mata Hari among them.
Best for Perfume-as-literature line.
Gérald Ghislain was born in 1964 and spent part of his childhood in Morocco before training in hotel management and opening his own restaurant in Paris at 22. A visit to the Grasse Perfume Museum redirected him toward fragrance: in 1997 he enrolled at ISIPCA, the French school for higher education in perfumery, and after training there founded his own house, Histoires de Parfums, in 2000. The brand released two debut fragrances that year, Blanc Violette and Noir Patchouli, and Ghislain built the rest of the collection around a recurring naming device — dedicating scents to historical and literary figures and marking each fragrance with that person's birth year: 1725 Casanova, 1804 George Sand, 1826 Eugénie de Montijo, 1828 Jules Verne, 1740 Marquis de Sade, 1873 Colette, 1876 Mata Hari and 1899 Hemingway among them. Ghislain has described his own path into perfumery as a 'frantic rhythm' shaped by earlier, unrelated careers, and continues to develop Histoires de Parfums fragrances around literary and historical references rather than conventional marketing categories.
Gérald Ghislain’s library — perfumes as dated novels: 1804 George Sand, 1740 Marquis de Sade. Original scents were named for historical figures’ birth years (NST lists 1725 Casanova, 1740 Marquis de Sade, 1804 George Sand among the first).
Best for Narrative perfumes, historical themes and niche fragrance
The 1775 house that perfumed Marie-Antoinette — Quelques Fleurs, the first true floral bouquet. Fougère Royale (1882) established the fougère fragrance family. the house had no standalone store for more than 70 years before the 2025 François 1er boutique.
Best for French perfumes and revived Houbigant fragrance classics
Houbigant traces its lineage to 1775, when the twenty-three-year-old Jean-Francois Houbigant opened a modest perfumery shop at 57 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honore in Paris, later renumbered 19 when the street was reorganized in 1806. He marked the storefront with the emblem of a basket of flowers, a symbol the house retained for generations. Houbigant's fragrances passed through some of the era's most storied hands: Marie-Antoinette is recorded as having carried vials of Houbigant scent in her corsage on the day of her execution in 1793, and the house later supplied Napoleon Bonaparte and Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia. In 1912, Houbigant introduced Quelques Fleurs, credited as the first true multi-floral bouquet fragrance -- a departure from the single-note or herb-blended perfumes that had preceded it, and an innovation that reshaped how floral fragrances were composed for decades afterward. After a fifty-year absence from its home city, Houbigant Paris (now under the Perris Group) returned to French retail in 2025 with an 80-square-metre flagship boutique at 62 Rue Francois 1er, steps from the Champs-Elysees between Avenue Montaigne and Avenue George V, alongside a companion boutique in Cannes. Both stock the historic Houbigant fragrance line together with the Perris Monte Carlo, Perris Portofino, and Perris Swiss Laboratory ranges.
Founded in 1594 by apothecary Riemon Ōno directly across from Kyoto's Nishi Hongan-ji temple, Kungyokudo has traded aromatic wood, incense and sachets from the same spot for more than 430 years, and it describes itself as Japan's oldest incense supplier.
Best for Aromatic wood and incense from Japan's oldest incense house
Kungyokudo opened in 1594, the third year of the Bunroku era, when founder Riemon Ōno set up as an apothecary directly across from Nishi Hongan-ji temple in Kyoto, supplying incense and medicine to the temple's Jōdo Shinshū monks. The headquarters still stands on that same spot in Shimogyo-ku, roughly fifteen minutes' walk from Kyoto Station, making it, by the company's own account, Japan's oldest incense supplier at more than 430 years old. The shop's core categories remain aromatic wood, incense, and sachets, sold both for temple and ceremonial use and for everyday home fragrance, with a Sakaimachi line among its more contemporary offerings. A separate Kungyokudo Teramachi store, opened in 2022, extends the brand into central Kyoto with a curated selection of its historic scents. Unlike some of Kyoto's other old incense houses, Kungyokudo does not appear to run its own dedicated history museum — that distinction in the city belongs to a competitor's Kunjyukan space — but its unbroken four-century tenure in front of Nishi Hongan-ji functions as its own kind of living exhibit, still serving the same temple community it opened to serve in the sixteenth century.
Paris perfume house founded in 1798 by Pierre-Francois Lubin, originally trading as 'Au Bouquet de Roses'; supplied Empress Josephine and became the first French perfumer to export to the US, in 1830.
Best for Napoleonic-era heritage eaux.
Lubin was founded in Paris in 1798 by Pierre-Francois Lubin, who opened a perfumery shop at 53 rue Helvetius - later renamed rue Sainte-Anne - under the sign 'Au Bouquet de Roses,' understood as a discreet tribute to Marie Antoinette, recently executed at the time. Lubin trained under Jean-Louis Fargeon, perfumer to the queen, starting in 1784, and later apprenticed in Grasse from 1792. His signature success was the 'Eau vivifiante,' which evolved into 'Eau de Toilette Lubin' and won favor at the imperial court - records at the Musee International de la Parfumerie in Grasse include an order from Empress Josephine dated 1809. By 1830 the house had become the first French perfumer to export to the United States, and in 1834 Queen Marie-Amelie made it an official court supplier.
A pharmacy rooted in the Dominican friars’ herb garden of 1221; Caterina de’ Medici’s Acqua della Regina still on the shelf; frescoed sales rooms. Established 1612.
Best for Acqua di Santa Maria Novella, potpourri, rose water
Begin with the date, because almost nothing else in retail can match it: 1221. Dominican friars arrive in Florence, plant a garden, and start preparing balms and waters for their own infirmary. For four centuries this is a monastery's side room — and then, in 1612, it opens formally as an officina, a working pharmacy with the city at its counter. By that point its most famous commission is already historic: Caterina de' Medici, departing to become Queen of France, had her personal fragrance made here — Acqua della Regina, the Queen's Water. It is still on the shelf. You can walk in off the Via della Scala this afternoon and buy the scent a Medici carried to the French court.
That continuity is the whole character of the place. The sales rooms are frescoed — genuinely frescoed, ceilings that would justify an entry ticket — and the transaction happens beneath them at an unhurried pace the building itself seems to enforce. Nobody rushes in a room where the decoration is four hundred years old. The products keep the old taxonomy: waters, essences, potpourri in the famous terracotta urns, soaps aged the slow way. The pharmacy's original trade — remedies, preparations, things a friar would recognize — persists alongside the perfumery like a signature that never left the document.
Eight centuries have reorganized Florence around this address many times over. Republics fell, dynasties rose, the street names changed. The officina kept its garden logic: grow, distill, prepare, sell. The house calls it the oldest pharmacy in the world — not because it survived, plenty of names survive, but because it never stopped doing the actual work. That is the difference between a monument and a shop. This is, gloriously, still a shop.
French perfume house tracing to 1720, when Fargeon Aine became perfumer to the court of Louis XV; the maison closed in the 1940s and was revived in 2012 by Franck Belaiche and Hugo Lambert, recreating historic formulas from archival research.
Best for Time-capsule court perfumes.
Oriza L. Legrand's history begins in 1720 with Fargeon Aine, a member of a Montpellier apothecary-and-perfumer family, who established himself in Paris as perfumer and distiller to the court of Louis XV. Over the following century and a half the maison became an official supplier to the French court through to the reign of Napoleon III, and also supplied royal courts in Russia, Italy and England. Like many old French perfume houses, it eventually closed - in the 1940s - and sat dormant for decades. In 2012, Franck Belaiche and Hugo Lambert revived Oriza L. Legrand, drawing on historical research to bring several of the maison's earlier fragrances back into production alongside new compositions in the same antique idiom.
A working pharmacy trading since 1734, still dispensing from the High Street. Alongside prescriptions it sells its own-label toiletries, fragrances and skincare in traditional apothecary style.
Best for Heritage apothecary and own-label toiletries
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