COTTAGE INDUSTRY:Burren Perfumery has been likened to the Jo Malone of Ireland, but its owner, Sadie Chowen, is fearful of getting too big and losing the personal touch she cherishes, writes Catherine Cleary
MODERN IRELAND falls away as you drive to Sadie Chowen's Co Clare home. First the B&B signs, the for-sale signs and then the rest of the visual clamour disappear. The road markings go. The road becomes a single strip of tar with telegraph poles on one side and the stone hills of the Burren around every bend.
Then I start to notice the wild flowers. My foot eases up on the accelerator.
Soon I am sitting at a table under tree-dappled shade with the nicest home-made scone and jam I can remember tasting. A sleek marmalade cat is sizing the situation up for treats. And the owner of the Burren Perfumery, or Ireland's answer to Jo Malone, is talking about the dangers of artisan businesses becoming too successful.
We are sitting outside the new tearoom at the perfumery which is annexed to the home of Chowen, her husband, their 11-year-old daughter and assorted family pets. Her approach to the catering division of her business is as dictatorial as the line she takes on her fragrances and other products. "We only serve what I like to eat," she says.
A vegetarian with a love for organic and locally grown food and produce, that means local apple juice, cheese and salad plates and the mouthwatering scones served with a sticky dish of apricot and almond jam.
That morning she had been to the Galway farmers' market, and already the pastel-painted tables are filling with visiting family groups. The new tearoom was made from a converted outhouse, now smartly painted with pale blue timber windows. Upstairs there is a staff apartment and beside it the workshop, where edible-looking soaps are cut from trays, like brownies.
Chowen has been living in deepest Clare for 17 years after arriving from her native London to visit a friend and falling in love with the tiny village of Carron. She still remembers the magic of her arrival on a May evening. Surrounded by heavy silence, she had a strong feeling she had just come home.
She moved into a derelict cottage and renovated it, and was overwhelmed by the gifts of whiskey and cake that arrived from the neighbours. Shortly afterwards she started working in Ireland's oldest perfumery and then five years ago she bought the business.
The tearoom is a little slice of her childhood home in the French Dordogne, near Bordeaux, where her mother ran a guesthouse. "I have mixed it all, I suppose, the English country garden, French Provencal and Irish countryside." Her childhood memories of France are of meadows of sunflowers or lavender, "bees buzzing around and the abundance of it, the intensity of smells in the markets, of ripe peaches and tomatoes."
The perfumery was started by Clare man Brian Mooney, who trained in the French perfume capital of Grasse. His voice can still be heard on the quaintly old-fashioned slideshow about the plants of the Burren that visitors can watch. His products were wrapped in green linen and gold thread and sold on US flights.
"When the business began to flourish, I think he was a visionary rather than a businessman," Chowen explains. Another business partner came in and the company started to move more into the mainstream. Now Chowen has made it all more feminine and taken the design element a notch higher. Since then, a few people have travelled down the road to the perfumery and offered to turn her into Jo Malone or L'Occitane.
She is resisting the offers so far and is determined to stay in control of everything that bears her company's name. Last year they made 50,000 soaps by hand, and Doonbeg Golf Club and Hotel and the Morrison Hotel, among others, commissioned a range of organic lotions and room products. Like many artisan companies (how many farmers' markets millionaires are there now?) they are trying to tread the line carefully between handmade small scale production and meeting the demands of a market where organic and natural are no longer niche products.
Chowen's business ethos is that she only wants to make things that she would want to buy herself. "We never did conform to the idea of the shamrock products. It was all about the natural and organic side of things and the Irish market has come up to meet us."
The company sells on mail order through their website, to visitors who come to the perfumery, and to small shops. The perfumes are modestly priced at €35 for a 100ml bottle. Soaps sell for €6.50. Should someone want their own fragrance, they can travel down to the Burren to choose their desired blend. For between €3,000 and €4,000 they will get a unique scent blended and bottled for them.
"I made a decision I would let the wholesale market go because then you get into mass distribution and that's when you start cutting corners." The perfume market has changed from being a luxury, high-end treat - "like buying a cashmere sweater" - to a marketing industry where high turnover is everything.
Chowen designed the company's three perfumes - Spring, Summer and Autumn - "after a lot of thinking and smelling and deciding what I like." She is as hands-on as it is possible to be. She wears a striped shop apron tied around her tiny waist and her fingernails are work-short. She confesses to being "a little bit obsessive" about how things are presented and the staff laugh at her endless rearranging of the soaps on the counter. She gets a little bit of distance from it all in Paris, where the family spends some time every year to allow her daughter to learn French and to reconnect with her own French roots.
"There have always been a lot of people who want to make it into the Jo Malone of Ireland, but if you go that big you haven't got time any more to arrange the soaps on the shelves. As it is, it's comfortably growing on its own and I don't want to make it into a brand."
One labour of love element of the business is the perfumery's herb garden, set into a natural dip in the land where the old kitchen garden once grew. A lot of the plants are native wild flowers. Honey-smelling meadowsweet is planted beside pink-blossomed mallow. At the end, an iron bedstead is planted with comfrey. Last year a man made of moss (and christened Mossie) slumbered in it. A rusted cast-iron bath waits for Mrs Mossie to be installed next summer.
The herb garden provides a few modest quantities of herbs for herbal teas, but the raw ingredients for the perfumery come from small growers, mainly in France and Spain. The idea that they pluck the herbs at 6am with wicker baskets to make the perfumes is such "good copy" that a few magazines have been unable to resist romanticising it all, just a little.
But Chowen is a pragmatic businesswoman, who regularly attends an annual conference about the future of the Burren. "The richness of the area is the population - the people who live here - and they need proper jobs, other cottage industries making things rather than just selling things."
The company has just started making face, hand and body creams, hand blending them in small batches. In the workshop, a member of staff is whipping up a batch of honey and orange oil lip balm, a butter-coloured concoction. She is mixing in teaspoons of their own honey with a kitchen hand blender, adding a few drops of orange oil.
"It's very like Neal's Yard and I can really see how that started now." The customers are the same people who will spend €4 on a hand-made loaf of organic spelt bread, she explains, rather than expecting it to cost the same as a white sliced pan. "It's more of a treat. It's more sensuous, somehow more voluptuous, just not as ordinary."
At the end of the tour, she describes herself as "not a great perfume person". At the moment, she prefers the company's floral waters, zingy sprays that will be the latest addition to the range. She gives me a spritz of a ginger and lime floral water on the inside of my wrist. (You can give your face a quick spritz for a surprisingly pleasant wake-up call.) "It's not going to stay on you forever." So she wants to make them in biro-sized handbag bottles. The scent, like the calm of the Burren, has evaporated by the time I get home. "I sat down for several days in our lab in Paris to create them. They're just things that I like. I've never smelt them anywhere else. And they're not complicated."
www.burrenperfumery.com