Heritage
A house, in its own words
Eric Buterbaugh grew up in Purcell, Oklahoma, where he kept a cabinet of fifty perfume bottles as a teenager. He moved to Los Angeles in the early 1990s and, in 1999, founded Eric Buterbaugh Flower Design, LLC. The studio quickly attracted celebrity clients and earned a reputation for theatrical installations and seasonal displays. By 2015, the florist decided to extend his expertise beyond petals and launched EB Florals, a perfume line that mirrors his floral aesthetic. The first releases—Velvet Lavender, Sultry Rose, Regal Tuberose, and Apollo Hyacinth—arrived the same year as his flagship retail space opened on Melrose Avenue. In 2016, he added two osmanthus‑focused scents, Beverly Osmanthus and Kingston Osmanthus, expanding the line’s geographic inspiration to Asia. 2019 marked a shift toward richer accords with Oud Saffron and Oud Gardenia, blending traditional Middle Eastern notes with Western flower motifs. A 2020 rebranding effort renamed the brand Eric Buterbaugh Los Angeles, aligning the perfume identity with his broader creative practice. Throughout the decade, the line has remained independent, with production handled by boutique fragrance houses in France and Italy, while the founder continues to curate the scent profiles himself. The brand’s evolution reflects a consistent thread: a florist who treats perfume as another medium for arranging beauty. Eric Buterbaugh treats scent as a garden you can wear. He believes that a single flower can convey a memory, so each fragrance isolates one botanical note or pairs it with a complementary accent. The creator avoids generic “floral” blends; instead, he selects ingredients that match the texture, color, and season of the real bloom. He values transparency, sourcing natural extracts when possible and disclosing the primary accord in each launch. The line’s modest size lets him focus on quality over quantity, and he often references his own floral installations when describing a perfume’s structure. For example, the gardenia scent mirrors the layered petals of a bridal bouquet, while the osmanthus offerings echo the delicate white blossoms that line Japanese tea gardens. By grounding each perfume in a concrete floral reference, he aims to give consumers an intuitive, sensory shortcut to the scent’s inspiration.
