Cultivating Home Luxury Scents Without Chemicals

Y’all, I’m a Hilton girl. In all our travels I know I can count on them to be consistently clean and to provide excellent service. When I walk into the lobby, it doesn’t smell like “home,” it smells SO much better. Fragrant but clean and crisp, not weirdly perfumey but enough that it’s assertively “there.” I decided to dig in and reverse-engineer the smells of some of the best hotel lobbies. What I found was with a few simple natural ingredients, you can easily create home luxury scents of your own.

Pink background with plates and dried flowers and headline Home Luxury Scents Hotel Edition.

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Home Luxury Scent Tips:

  1. Clean first! You can’t introduce a luxury scent if there are lingering odors in your home. I use the most fragrance-neutral cleaning products possible (see the link for my recipe) and you can add many of these ingredients to our DIY recipe to reinforce the yummy smell every time you clean.
  2. Use natural ingredients if you can. I don’t like chemicals in my house when I can avoid them.
  3. Diffuse essential oils. One of the easiest ways to add a natural fragrance to your home is to diffuse essential oils. Simply add a few drops of your favorite essential oil to a diffuser and let the scent fill the air.
  4. Choose candles wisely. Here’s how. And go with a warmer instead of burning them if you want to be extra clean.
  5. If you’d prefer to buy rather than DIY, Hilton’s White Tea & Thyme scent is available at Aroma Retail. They have many other hotel-inspired scents in several formulations as well. (If you happen to be a Hawaii traveler who wants that Hilton Grand Wailea smell year-round, I don’t think there’s any replicating this Tommy Bahama candle.)
  6. Make your own room spray. If you’re on a budget, you can easily make your own room spray at home. Simply combine a few drops of essential oil with water and a bit of vodka in a glass spray bottle. Shake well and spritz around your home as needed. Test on surfaces in an inconspicuous place first.
  7. Place bowls of potpourri around your home. It’s old school, but potpourri is still a great way to add a natural fragrance to your home. Simply place bowls (love these berry bowls) or baskets of potpourri around your home and let the scent fill the air.
  8. Get plants. Plants not only add beauty to your home, but they also help to improve air quality. Some of the best plants for removing odors include:

Our Recipes for Hotel Lobby Scents:

You can make your own scents at home, here are some of our favorite combinations:

Be safe – none of these are meant to be eaten or rubbed on the skin, please protect your skin when working with natural ingredients and oils, and keep all products away from children and pets.

My favorite way to deploy essential oils is wood flowers tossed in the oil mix, then put on display in a warm or sunny area of the house. So pretty, and you can make the smell as strong as you like and easily refresh it as needed. You can also make the potpourri mixes above and refresh them with oils as needed. I layer solid potpourri with our DIY cleaning spray and a DIY room spray and you can smell it throughout the house. I don’t use candles but they can definitely be added to the mix. There are so many ways to layer fragrance, get creative!

Here are some additional tips for making your house smell like a hotel lobby:

By following these tips, you can create a home that smells just as luxurious as a nice hotel and feel like you’re on vacation every day. The most fun can be creating your own home luxury scents by experimenting. I love handing friends a gift of our unique scent that they can’t buy when they ask where we got it.

Happy creating!