BYREDO Paints Madrid Forest Green and Bottles the Present Tense

At Claudio Coello 73, BYREDO has swapped white Scandinavian calm for deep forest green, and reopened with a vanilla scent about memories that haven’t happened yet.

Calle Claudio Coello is named after the last great Spanish painter of the seventeenth century, a Baroque artist whose best-known work fills the sacristy of El Escorial with portraits of priests and courtiers. The street he lends his name to cuts through Madrid’s Salamanca district and still runs on the logic of arrangement: windows composed to be looked at, interiors built to slow people down. At number 73, BYREDO has reopened its boutique after a renovation that makes its case from the pavement. The walls have gone a dense, saturated forest green, light is aimed at objects instead of washed across the room, and there is now somewhere to sit while making up one’s mind about a perfume.

 

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The reopening party, held around the start of October, doubled as the Spanish introduction of Future Memories, the house’s newest eau de parfum. Madrid’s creative crowd came through for it. Actors Anna Castillo, Greta Fernández and Julio Peña Fernández were there, alongside stylists Carla Paucar and Jesus Lafuente, artists Mr Piro and Gianfranco La Vecchia, and models Francisco Faria and Álex Sánchez de Mora, all getting a first look at a room that no longer resembles the BYREDO most of them would have known.

Signal. What happened: BYREDO reopened its Madrid boutique after a full interior redesign by its in-house architecture team, and used the evening to present its new fragrance, Future Memories, in Spain. Exact object: the renovated BYREDO store at Calle Claudio Coello 73, the brand’s original Spanish flagship, plus Future Memories Eau de Parfum, composed by Quentin Bisch and sold in 50ml and 100ml. When and where: the Madrid store reopened around the start of October 2026 in the Salamanca district; Future Memories launched internationally in July 2026 and retails in the US at $330 through BYREDO stores, byredo.com and selected retailers. Source: the design and guest details come from METAL Magazine’s report from the reopening, cross-checked against coverage of the fragrance’s international launch and BYREDO’s recent store openings. Why it matters: Madrid is the latest in a run of BYREDO store projects under Puig, after Barcelona in 2025 and Hong Kong in April 2026, and each one now leans on a single dominant colour and material story to say where the brand comes from.

The project was handled by BYREDO’s own architecture team, and its reference point is the museum: give each object space, then light it properly. Products are set apart from one another instead of packed into runs, and the lighting does the steering, pulling the eye toward bottles, candles and the surfaces they sit on. Each piece has an assigned spot. It is a quieter way of selling beauty than the dense, wall-to-wall merchandising common in the category, closer in spirit to a vitrine than to a shelf.

The seating area is the most practical change, and arguably the most telling. Fragrance rarely rewards a snap decision, since a blotter smells different ten minutes after it was sprayed, and the renovated room builds that delay into the floor plan, with chairs and room to linger.

This is the store’s second life. BYREDO first opened on Claudio Coello in autumn 2021 as its first flagship in Spain, a compact space of just over 64 square metres fitted out in anodised and galvanised aluminium with coloured terrazzo, the metallic vocabulary the brand had used across its shops for years. At the time, founder Ben Gorham said he had chosen the address with care, describing the street as a showcase for the city’s luxury and fashion culture. He also said the flagship was meant to reflect Madrid’s ties to the art world and its cultural depth, which makes the new museum-minded layout read less like a break with the original idea than a fuller version of it. The renovated room keeps that address but trades the cool metal register for something warmer and far more assertive.

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Tint is the headline. The green is drawn from traditional Swedish folk painting, a deliberate reach back to BYREDO’s Stockholm origins, and it undercuts the stock image of Scandinavian design as white walls and blond wood. BYREDO has gone the other way, toward pigment.

Sweden’s best-known folk painting traditions took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when travelling painters from Dalarna covered farmhouse walls, cupboards and painted hangings in stylised flowers and foliage. The kurbits, a swirling, gourd-like plant motif, became the hallmark of the style and still turns up today on the hand-painted Dala horses sold across the country. Its origin carries a quiet irony for a shop on a street named after a Baroque painter: the motif began as the Dalarna painters’ free reinterpretation of an ornamental Baroque urn spilling leaves, flowers and fruit, a device earlier painters in neighbouring Hälsingland had used. BYREDO hasn’t specified which regional tradition informed the Madrid green, but the gesture is clear enough: take a Swedish source that long predates minimalism and bring its saturation into a luxury shop on a Spanish street.

There is a neat echo in the brand’s own history. BYREDO was founded in Stockholm in 2006, its name a contraction of “by redolence,” and the very first fragrance it released was called Green, built on sage, orange and musk. Twenty years on, the colour has moved from the bottle to the walls.

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The Madrid makeover lands at a specific moment for the house. Puig, the Barcelona-founded beauty group, took a majority stake in BYREDO in 2022 in a deal that reportedly valued the brand at around €1 billion, and later moved to full ownership. Gorham stayed on as chief creative officer under an agreed transition and stepped away at the end of June 2025, close to two decades after starting the label with a small run of eaux de parfum. Since then, BYREDO’s physical stores have become one of the clearest places to read how the brand is being steered.

What Gorham handed over was already much more than a perfume label. Under him, BYREDO moved into makeup in 2020, built out leather goods and lifestyle objects, and in 2023 added a fine jewellery line drawing on his Indian heritage. Inside Puig it joins a fashion and fragrance division that accounted for 73 percent of group sales in 2024, a year in which Puig’s revenue rose 11.3 percent to €4.79 billion, and a stated strategy of pushing the group’s more creative brands into direct retail in carefully chosen locations.

Barcelona came first. On June 26, 2025, BYREDO opened its first store in the Catalan capital at Consell de Cent 349, inside the former Sala Dalmau, a space regarded as an icon of Catalan modernisme. The roughly 70 square metre shop, conceived as a continuation of an art gallery, marked the European debut of the brand’s new store concept, with fragrance, candles and body care on the ground floor and a makeup vanity and private client space upstairs. In the same weeks, Puig opened the first Spanish boutique of Penhaligon’s, its British perfume house, directly across the street.

Hong Kong followed in April 2026 with a new flagship on Gough Street in Central. BYREDO first entered the city in 2015 and opened its first standalone store there, in Causeway Bay, in 2022; the new address is its first street-level flagship since. Its facade is wrapped in folded stainless steel that recalls the city’s traditional shopfront gates, while inside, granite floors and textured plaster are warmed by burgundy lacquered panels, a colour the brand treats as one of its signatures. A built-in sink lets shoppers test products on the spot.

Set side by side, the three rooms share a method more than a look. Each anchors itself with materials and one dominant colour: Hong Kong’s steel shutters and burgundy, Barcelona’s gallery past, and now, in Madrid, a green borrowed from the brand’s own Swedish roots instead of from the city outside. Spain, which had a single BYREDO address until the summer of 2025, now has two, with Madrid the elder of the pair.

 

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Future Memories arrived in July with an unusual premise for a house that has always traded on recollection. BYREDO built its following on scents tied to particular places and remembered moments. This one aims at the moment a memory is still being made: the present, viewed from a little way ahead. BYREDO’s own copy presents it as a nudge toward living with intention, with the scent serving as a bookmark for days that will only later turn out to matter.

The perfumer is Quentin Bisch, and his name on the bottle is a small story of its own. Much of BYREDO’s catalogue was composed with longtime convincer Jérôme Epinette, and Bisch comes from a different lineage. Born in Strasbourg in 1983, he studied dance and theatre and ran a performing company before persisting until Givaudan admitted him to its perfumery school without a chemistry degree. He has since signed fragrances across designer and niche perfumery, including work for Jean Paul Gaultier and L’Artisan Parfumeur, two houses that also sit inside Puig’s portfolio.

Bisch summed up the new scent as being about “the scent you wear today becoming the memory others keep of you.” The fragrance comes in 50ml and 100ml and retails in the US at $330, sold through BYREDO’s own stores, its website and selected international retailers.

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Vanilla is the spine of Future Memories, though not in the soft, bakery register the note so often defaults to. BYREDO’s pitch is that vanilla here is something to inspect, not a blanket to sink into, and the build reflects that.

Galbanum essence comes first, the bitter, leafy resin behind the snap of many classic green perfumes, brightened by a blackcurrant accord and aldehydes. Orris butter and labdanum form the middle, joined by orange blossom and a white vanilla accord. The foundation is a vanilla liquor accord, Madagascar vanilla, Ambrofix and musks, which pull the composition toward amber. On paper it reads as a green musk with vanilla at its centre.

That structure suits the concept. The green top notes are what a quick spray catches; the vanilla and musk are what remain hours later, so the version of the scent anyone remembers is not the one they first met. A perfume built that way is a fair stand-in for a moment whose weight only shows itself afterward, and it makes the chairs in Madrid less a nicety than a working part of the shop.

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For the campaign, BYREDO turned to French photographer and director Arnaud Lajeunie, who photographed real-life couple Marina Ontanaya and Louis Baines around the lake at Lourensford, on the edge of Cape Town in South Africa. The pictures read as glimpses rather than scenes, loose and unposed, with the couple’s familiarity doing the job a storyline might otherwise do. BYREDO cast them because they are a couple off camera too, and that ease is the point for a fragrance about moments whose meaning arrives later.

Lajeunie also produced a set of floral still lifes for the campaign, quieter frames that sit beside the portraits and return to the same theme without people in them. Taken together, the two strands keep the campaign close to the scent’s argument: the important moments rarely announce themselves while they are happening.

Back in Madrid, the street now gets its own view in. The large front window at Claudio Coello 73, treated as an extension of the room instead of a separate display box, is reserved for BYREDO’s campaigns, and inside, Future Memories sits on the shelves in both sizes, a few steps from the new chairs.