At Home with D.S. & Durga

Rymn Massand visits the Long Island country home of the celebrated perfumers, and finds a sanctuary layered with their individual stories.

- Rymn Massand

For a couple like Kavi Ahuja and David Seth Moltz—cofounders of the brilliant, New York City–based fragrance brand D.S. & Durga—who describe their work in purely poetic terms, as aromatic landscapes evoking stories, fragments of music, literature, art, and moments past while painting a picture through scent, the spaces they inhabit veer towards the carefully considered minimal. They will be the first to tell you that they are not minimalists; that they love layering, ornamentation, and texture; and that they are storytellers at heart and each space has a (their) story built into it, and each element of that space is in harmony with that story.

The first time I walked into their store in New York City many years ago, I was struck by its brutalist beauty, tempered by the poetry of their fragrance stories; it seemed like such a perfectly unexpected balance. Years later, as I enter their new home set amongst the farms and vineyards of the North Fork in Long Island, New York, I am struck anew.