The House
Maison Appalachia is a two-person operation in Northeast Tennessee. Every bottle is blended, filled, labeled, and boxed by hand, in batches of eight or ten. There is no lab, no warehouse, and no staff beyond the two of us.
What we make are interpretations. We take fragrances we admire — designer, niche, some famous and some nearly forgotten — and build our own version as an extrait de parfum at 25% concentration - as faithful to the inspiration fragrance as we can.
About the names
We opened Maison Appalachia with French names. "Maison" invited them, and they sounded the way perfume is supposed to sound. But they were borrowed, and they said nothing about where the bottles actually come from. A customer searching for one of our fragrances got a French phrase that meant nothing to them and told them nothing about us.
So we're changing them. The catalog is moving to names taken from real places in Southern Appalachia — mountains, creeks, gaps, balds, and hollers across East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, Southwest Virginia, North Georgia, Southeast Kentucky, West Virginia, and upstate South Carolina. Bays Mountain. Devil's Bathtub. Blackberry Winter. Every name on the shelf is a place you can stand in, or a thing anyone raised here would recognize.
The house keeps its name. Maison Appalachia is the whole point: a French word for house, and the mountains it sits in.
What doesn't change
The fragrance doesn't. If you bought a bottle under a French name and it now carries an Appalachian one, it's the same formula, same concentration, same hands. Only the label changed.
You will still see French names on the site for a while. Every product has to be renamed, relabeled, and rewritten one at a time, and there are only two of us doing it between everything else. It's getting done, just slowly. Whatever name a bottle carries, the inspired-by line on the listing tells you exactly what's inside.
Our special releases keep the names they were born with — the Rivalry collection, the Haints collection, and The Holler.