The Return
West Village. Eight in the morning.
I had a plan. A very exciting plan: two days, sixteen fragrance houses, and the city itself — my first love. I'd lived in New York for twenty-four years, and it had shaped me in every way that mattered. It taught me people, art, how to love. It still teaches me, every time I go back.
I was going to walk it. I always walk it — three to five miles a day, easy. It's how I love New York best.
The day didn't open at a fragrance house. It opened at Jones Road.
I met Bobbi Brown when I was twenty-four years old, a PR assistant at Neiman Marcus in Washington, D.C., standing at a fork in my own life: Dallas, where my career was lined up, or New York, with a boy and no idea what came next. Bobbi traveled from New York for a David Yurman trunk show. She was a young makeup artist still building her name. She did my makeup that day. It was a very long time ago, and I remember it as clear as day.
Years later — after Estée Lauder bought Bobbi Brown, after she stepped back from her own name, after she started Jones Road — I walked into her new shop in New York. Her line. Her hand back in it. A lineage that bends through ownership and back into authorship.
A young makeup artist greeted me at the door — came out from the counter, started chatting with me right away, the kind of instant connection you can't manufacture. I had a few candle samples in my bag, the way I do, and I asked if she'd like to smell my work. She said yes, with delight.
She turned them over slowly in her hands, lifted them to her face, set them down, picked them up again. She was studying them.
I hadn't expected that. I'd come to look at other people's work, and the first place of the morning was someone else looking at mine.
That kind of engagement set the tone for the whole trip — the embrace of curiosity, the outpouring of warmth, the way presence multiplies when two people are awake to the same moment.
Two days in. Saint Ambroeus, Upper East Side. Breakfast, the sit-down kind. I'd been walking the city for two days and wanted a coffee, a window, and a slow morning before I had to catch my train to Baltimore to see family. The New York portion of the trip was coming to a close.
A woman sat down at the next table, and we fell into conversation the way you do when both of you are open to it — laughing about life, the way it surprises you. She'd spent her life in the fragrance world. She shared her work. I shared mine. By the time we'd finished breakfast, a friendship had formed, and as we said goodbye she gave me a list of names — shops, people I had to meet. The way it happens in New York when you're awake to the people in front of you.
The whole trip was like that. Engagement everywhere. Curiosity everywhere. The city giving me, as it always does, exactly what I needed before I knew I needed it. This time it was joy — possibility, opportunity, the freedom to play. I even spotted Julianne Moore outside the Marlton one morning, and it felt like the city winking at me, the way it does when you're paying attention.
The lineage of my own work has been an interesting one. Twenty-plus years a yoga teacher. Six years a sommelier. Perfumer all my life, though I came to it without formal training — drawn to scent as a key element of joy long before I'd learned to call myself by the name. From the outside the practices don't look connected, but they are: the same attention to the senses, the same listening, the same way of meeting a moment fully. You never know how one thing leads to another until you can stand back and see the whole of it at once.
New York let me see it that way again. Every trip changes me in some small, important way, and this one affirmed something I'm already building — a kind of place where a guest is seen, acknowledged, inspired. I'll tell you which places in the next letter.
People. Place. Purpose — lived through both. I went with a plan. I always come open to what New York will hand me, and grateful, always grateful, for what it does.
Over the next two months I'm going to walk you through all sixteen houses — the oldest, the newest, the ones that spoke my language. The people who made each place. The two doorways in Manhattan that hold the years of my life I lived there.
This is the first letter. Two more in the first trilogy will follow.
Presence · Ritual · Beauty
Stephanie