Three years ago, I checked into one of India’s most celebrated hotels in Udaipur. I expected beauty – the architecture, the lake, the service. What I didn’t expect was to stop in the corridor and simply stand there, trying to understand what I was breathing.

The fragrance was everywhere and nowhere. It wasn’t a candle. It wasn’t a spray. It was woven into the air of the entire palace – warm, unhurried, completely unlike anything I had ever smelled in someone’s home. I asked the staff. They smiled politely. The scent, they explained, was proprietary. I went home and spent weeks trying to source it anyway. I couldn’t.

Las Vegas, a year later – a luxury casino hotel on the Strip. A different continent, and I stopped in the lobby the same way. It kept happening: a safari lodge in the Serengeti, warm with baobab wood and wild earth; a beach hotel in Nusa Dua, Balinese frangipani on a sea breeze. Each time I tried to find the scent. Each time: proprietary.

Hotels understand something most of us don’t. Scent sets the tone before you see anything, before you touch anything. So why do we accept that our homes, where we spend most of our lives, smell like nothing in particular?

Quint Home exists because I couldn’t stop thinking about that.