Perfume Making Workshop in Marylebone: Luxe 1-to-1 at EPC

Experimental Perfume Club moved its London lab-boutique to 9 Gee's Court, London W1U 1JH, on the Marylebone and Mayfair border, and it is open every day of the week. The headline experience is the Luxe Blending Experience, a private one-to-one hour in the Perfumer's Alcove with a Blending Master. You leave with a 50ml Eau de Parfum and your own formula. The gift voucher for it is priced at £195.

The club describes the London space as a working perfume lab you can walk into. You can go simply to smell the collection, to learn how a fragrance is built, or to create one of your own. The brand's own address page gives the opening hours as Monday 11:00 to 18:00, Tuesday to Saturday 11:00 to 19:00 and Sunday 12:00 to 18:00, so Sunday is the latest start of the week.

Treat the Gee's Court address as the only current one. Older directories and press pieces still place the club on Monmouth Street in Seven Dials, and the website's banner now reads that the club has moved. Anyone following an old map pin ends up in the wrong street. The club's contact page and lab-boutique page both give Gee's Court, and that is the address to aim for.

There is no public phone number on the club's contact or lab-boutique pages. The club asks you to write to bookings@experimentalperfumeclub.com for experiences, and to contact@experimentalperfumeclub.com for orders. Since replies arrive by email rather than at a counter, send your preferred date a few days before you plan to come, particularly for a weekend, when the private alcove is the first thing to fill.

Everything at the club is built on one system. Nine complete fragrances, called Essentials, are composed so that any two or three can be worn together. In a session, the Blending Master takes you through scent profiling, helps you choose which Essentials to combine, then lets you blend and mix them into your own fragrance. The last step is to name it and keep it.

That makes it a different class from a table of loose raw materials. You are not asked to master a wall of raw materials in an hour. You are given nine finished accords that already sit well together, and you learn by changing the proportions. A beginner leaves with something wearable, which is the whole point, and a more experienced nose can use the ratios to chase a very particular mood.

Every formula goes into what the club calls the EPC Ledger, under a unique code. The site says thousands of personal formulas are stored there. When your bottle runs low, you can find the code on the bottle or in your post-session email, and the club hand-blends it again in London from your original formula and sends it to you. Your name and visit date also work if the code is lost.

The Luxe Blending Experience is the full version. It is private and one-to-one, it lasts one hour, and it ends with a 50ml Eau de Parfum plus your formula. The matching gift voucher is listed at £195, and the club says a voucher gives the recipient a year to choose a date, come to the lab and create a fragrance with their name on the bottle.

The Discovery Session is the lighter option. It offers expert guidance with blending optional: you work out your scent profile and can have a personalised blend if you wish. The booking page lists it at £15, and the club says that if you blend on the day, the fee comes off your bottle. For someone unsure about spending £195, this is the sensible way to find out.

An honest pick: book the Discovery Session first if you have never blended before, and upgrade only if you enjoy the process. Skip it, and go straight to the Luxe hour, if you are buying for a milestone such as a wedding, because the private alcove removes the pressure of strangers watching you choose. One reviewer on the club's page wrote that they created a scent for their wedding there.

The club also takes private groups and corporate bookings. Its page lists birthdays, hen parties, team days and brand events, with a fragrance each, blended and named. There is a separate option for two people. You will meet couples celebrating, friends on a birthday, and people replacing a discontinued favourite with a formula of their own. The room feels closer to a studio than to a perfume counter.

The club's founder is Emmanuelle Moeglin, a perfumer trained at ISIPCA who spent years developing fragrances for the industry in Paris, Barcelona and New York. According to the brand's story page, she began hosting small workshops in London in 2016, where people could smell materials and try blending, and the idea grew into the Art of Blending system and then a full collection.

The brand also runs online courses for people who catch the bug, including a free mini-class and a Foundation programme in perfume creation. Those are for later. On the day, expect to focus on your nose, not on theory. Keep the first impressions simple, jot down which Essentials you reached for, and trust the one you returned to three times.

The club publishes a cancellation and rescheduling policy on its website, so read it before paying for a Luxe slot. The health and safety page is also linked from the footer. Come with clean, unscented skin, because strong perfume from the morning will blur every comparison between the blotters you smell.

The club says it ships worldwide from the UK, the EU and the US, and offers a sample service so you can find a scent before committing. It is B Corp certified, and returns are accepted within 30 days under its terms. Those details matter if you fall for one of the ready-made Essentials but want to try it at home before buying the full bottle.

Gee's Court is a small lane, quieter than the shopping streets around it. After a nose-heavy hour, walk to Marylebone High Street, the area's main draw, for a coffee and a pastry, and keep your wrist away from strong smells for a while. Eat something plain so the scent you made is the one you remember.

If you need a second perfume stop the same afternoon, Floris is a short taxi ride away on Jermyn Street, while 4160Tuesdays in Hammersmith offers one-day Saturday workshops and The Perfume Studio in Hoxton runs lively group classes. Each is a different style of making, so decide between a private lab hour, a day-long course and a social class.

Address: Experimental Perfume Club, 9 Gee's Court, London W1U 1JH. Hours: Monday 11:00 to 18:00, Tuesday to Saturday 11:00 to 19:00, Sunday 12:00 to 18:00. No public phone number is listed. Email bookings@experimentalperfumeclub.com for experiences. Prices: Luxe Blending Experience gift voucher £195, Discovery Session £15, credited against your bottle. Official site: experimentalperfumeclub.com.

Plan on an hour for the Luxe session and extra time to browse the Essentials collection. Bring a screenshot of your confirmation, a short list of scents you already love and a note of anything you dislike. A Blending Master works fastest when you can say 'not too sweet' or 'something like fresh linen', and your formula then travels with you for every reorder.