Marie du Petit Thouars
Founder and creative director of Maison Louis Marie, connecting a botanical family history, garden memory, and a photographer's eye with the house's scents.
Belgium
About Marie du Petit Thouars
Marie du Petit Thouars is the founder and creative director of Maison Louis Marie. She is most accurately presented not as a conventionally trained fragrance-house perfumer, but as a maker who selects botanical, familial, and place-based memories to direct the house's olfactory world.
Career
Raised between Belgium and France, she developed a feeling for plants during summers in her grandparents' garden. Work in editorial media and fine-art photography preceded a move to Los Angeles. Candles first made in her kitchen became the beginning of a brand developed with her husband, Matthew Berkson. Its name also carries the memory of her ancestor Louis-Marie Aubert du Petit-Thouars, a botanist and explorer.
Creative Style & Philosophy
Direction begins with plants actually seen, rooms inhabited, and places traveled rather than with a forecasted trend. Like a photographer, she avoids explaining the whole scene and selects details that release memory: light on wood, the color of a leaf, or dry earth. Nature is not used as decorative language; authenticity to lived experience is the house standard.
Signature Works
- *No.04 Bois de Balincourt* — Sandalwood, vetiver, and amber shaped into a personal memory of forest and old timber.
