The Art of Scent with Designer Simone Züger

‘Fresh air in the early morning, still cool and quiet. Light citrus, sun-warmed herbs, dry grasses, and a soft hint of wood carried by warm wind. Subtle, clear, and full of ease,’ sighs Simone Züger, designer, artist, entrepreneur, and the visual mind behind CERVO Mountain Resort‘s ‘Mystic Journey’ scent, as we talk about the smells that conjure summer. She’s a few days off a trip by the sea with her family, just as a heatwave settles over Zurich and the pull toward nature starts to feel inevitable.

The Zurich-based creative was approached by CERVO, the design-led Alpine resort perched above the village of Zermatt with view on the Matterhorn. She transformed the hotel’s olfactory identity, originally composed by Florentine perfumer Sileno Cheloni, into a curated design object. A brief that, over time, grew into a long-term collaboration. Mystic Journey, the scent itself, is built to hold a place: alpine grounding meeting the sensibility of Marrakesh, the cool presence of the Matterhorn against the warmth of woods and musk.

Whether you’re into the current cult of niche fragrances or not, scent shapes daily life more than we realise. And for Züger, it shapes her creative practice too. A smell can pull up a memory before the mind even catches up, bypassing thought entirely. From her studio, she puts it simply: ‘Scent has the ability to evoke memories and longings, and you immediately sense whether you feel at ease or not. That, to me, is what makes it so powerful.’ That word, ease, is a gateway to creating. ‘I work best when I feel at ease. My strongest ideas tend to emerge when I’m in nature, surrounded by meadows and fields of flowers, walking through forests, or simply breathing in fresh, clear air.’ Even, perhaps surprisingly, the sauna: ‘Inhaling, exhaling. That rhythm during a sauna infusion brings me into a different kind of awareness and often opens up entirely new perspectives.’ And when it comes to mood, that’s where all of her design practices – which range from furniture and lighting to textiles and spatial design, currently working on a Swiss residential project revolving around craftsmanship – start.

Her broader practice, the artist says, is about creating objects and spaces that challenge how we relate to our living environments; an object that shifts the mood of a room, a piece that asks you to look at a familiar space differently. Her art, which she paints when time allows, does the same thing, just more bluntly: bold black and white pieces, hand lettered phrases inside thick blob shapes, line drawn faces. ‘Who do you want to be?’, ‘What is next?’. One line questions standing in for whole essays, planted in a space until you notice them.

Scent works on the same environment, only invisibly. For CERVO Mountain Resort, Züger translated that idea into an object built around the interplay between emotion (scent inherently taps into such an emotional language), and reduction. Simone: ‘To me, a home scent feels genuinely right when it is surrounding, stimulating, and subtle at the same time. It should not dominate a space but gently blend into it, enhancing the atmosphere without becoming the focus. The best scents create a sense of well-being.’

Rather than to the room, there’s also a question toward the person, centered around identity. ‘In my work, I’m always drawn to philosophical questions around how identity is formed, through imprinting, society, personal interests, and origin, all interconnected.’ A scent, she believes, can let you try on a different version of yourself the way her drawings let a viewer sit with a question. Briefly, without necessarily needing an answer.

All bottled up, Simone walks us through her choices for the packaging design. The CERVO Mountain Resort’s packaging plays with typography and a reduced, near minimal approach, white space as a conscious choice, hammered paper standing in for the rawness of alpine rock. It’s restrained, but not without tension: a hand drawn illustration of a female body and a male head brings in a sensual dimension she returns to often in her work, pushing the object beyond function and into something closer to a gift, or a small object of desire.

All in all, the result of this newly designed spa line is that sense of ‘ease’ Simone always looks for and longs for. With, say, a scented candle this is something you can easily surround yourself with at home.

simonezueger.ch – cervo.swiss