Every other house on this list was built by a tailor, a silversmith, a couturier, or a royal court. Lorenzo Pazzaglia was built by a chef who couldn’t stop thinking about smell.
Lorenzo grew up in his father’s kitchen in Cagli, a small town in central Italy, surrounded by the kind of aromas you can’t really describe to someone who wasn’t there — garlic blooming in olive oil, herbs crushed fresh, the specific smell of something simmering for hours. As he’s put it himself, in his own words: “I grew up surrounded by the smells of my father’s cooking. I learnt to recognise them and took delight in cooking. I became a chef.” He eventually opened his own family restaurant, Il Poggio, and spent years building dishes the same way he’d later build fragrances — by instinct, by memory, by an obsessive attention to how smell shapes an entire experience.
But somewhere along the way, cooking stopped being enough. He started making perfumes the way a chef tinkers with a recipe on a slow night — first just for himself, then for friends, then, almost by accident, for the customers sitting at his own restaurant tables. He began as an amateur perfumer, creating scents for his own personal satisfaction as well as for friends and customers of his restaurant, and the thing that pushed him to actually launch a brand wasn’t ambition in the traditional sense — it was frustration. He kept falling in love with scents that faded too fast, that nobody around him could actually smell. So he set out to fix that himself: every Lorenzo Pazzaglia fragrance is built as a pure Extrait de Parfum, the highest concentration level that exists, deliberately engineered for maximum longevity and projection. If you wear it, people notice. That’s not an accident — that’s the whole design brief.
By 2015, he’d left the kitchen behind entirely to focus on perfumery full-time, and what followed was a small, fiercely independent house with a strange, wonderful identity: fragrance names like Carbonara, Black Sea, and Pax, a black-glass aesthetic, and an owl as the brand’s symbol — chosen, Lorenzo says, simply because it represents wisdom. By 2024, the recognition had caught up with the talent: he was named Rising Star Perfumer at the ScentXplore Awards, and his fragrance Sun-Gria won Fragrance of the Year. His work has been featured in Vogue and Elle, remarkable for a perfumer who started out making scents for restaurant regulars.
The fragrance that bottled an entire summer.
In 2023, at the Esxence exhibition in Milan — one of the most important stages in independent perfumery — Lorenzo unveiled Summer Hammer, and the description he gave it reads almost like a poem rather than a product spec: “I long for a fruity drink to glide over my skin… to smell elegant rum-tinged pineapple while resting on a bed of white, musk-scented flowers… I smear myself with sensual, soft, dreamy coconut milk cream before the crystal-clear sea.”
The fragrance itself delivers exactly on that promise — mango, pineapple, and white rum up top, a heart of coconut milk and marine notes, settling into sandalwood, vetiver, and warm amber. It’s built to feel like an entire beach vacation compressed into one bottle, the kind of scent meant to be worn in the dead of winter specifically so you can close your eyes and pretend otherwise. It earned international recognition fast, including Best Fragrance Revelation at the 2024 Perfume Awards in Madrid.
That’s the energy we chased with Aks Lagoon — that same sun-drenched, tropical-cocktail feeling, built to outlast a single afternoon at the beach.
