About Meet Haus

Every candle brand at this price point is selling you a feeling, and the words they use to do it are more or less the same: calm, clean, escape, sanctuary. The vocabulary changes but the strategy does not, which is to manufacture a mood and attach a scent to it.

Meet Haus works from the opposite direction. The scent starts with a real place, a specific neighborhood at a specific time of day with a specific quality of air, and the fragrance notes follow from that reality. Inner Harbor is the harbor at 6 a.m. before the tourist economy wakes up. Druid Hill is 745 acres of old-growth trees and a reservoir that has been there since 1860. Mt. Vernon is brownstones and cultural institutions built to outlast the people who built them.

Place is specific in a way that mood never is, and it does not change depending on how you feel when you light the candle. If you have ever noticed that different neighborhoods in a city smell different from each other and wondered why no one had built a fragrance around that observation, that is exactly what Meet Haus is.