The Story
Why it exists.
The beginning
Habibi NY built its reputation on emotionally driven scents, fragrances that move through feeling, not status. Penthouse Suede, composed by perfumer Julie Pluchet and released in 2023, represents the house's most refined statement yet on the tension between urban edge and intimate warmth. Where other releases in the portfolio lean toward oud-heavy grandeur or spiced florals, this one strips back to something more tactile. Pluchet understood the assignment immediately: build upward from suede, from texture, from the smell of something worn close to the skin.
What makes the composition unusual is the structural honesty. Most fragrances announce their identity in the top and let it degrade. Penthouse Suede reverses the logic. The opening, metallic, pink pepper, bergamot, is deliberately cool, almost standoffish. A city. Glass and steel. Then the heart softens. Geranium's green clarity meets violet-floral orris root. The orris itself is the technical showpiece: rare, requiring years of preparation, buttery and powdery in a way that no synthetic approximation achieves. Against this, the suede base reads differently than it might elsewhere. Not leathery. Not aggressive. Soft. Warm. The warmth of something that's been worn, lived in, earned.
The evolution
It opens cold. Metallic and pink pepper, bright, almost clinical. Bergamot flickers underneath but doesn't lead. This phase lasts maybe twenty minutes, then the metal accord softens. Not disappears. Recedes. What takes over is the geranium, aromatic, green, grounding, and the orris. The violet florals arrive quietly. The suede starts to assert itself around the forty-minute mark. Not as leather. As warmth. Amber and patchouli underneath, tonka bean lifting the edges. By hour two, the structure has inverted: warm base, soft heart, metallic trace. On fabric, the drydown extends further, cashmere wood and sandalwood lasting into the evening. What lingers isn't the opening's sharpness. It's the closeness. The suede-hours smell. The kind that stays on a collar, a sleeve, a pillow.
Cultural impact
Penthouse Suede enters the Reserve Collection as a 2023 release that sits at the intersection of two fragrance cultures: the warm, resin-forward traditions of Middle Eastern perfumery and the metallic-modern sensibility of New York niche. Wearers gravitate toward it for the way it bridges these registers, clean enough for daytime, warm enough for evening. The suede-centric brief is relatively uncommon in mass-niche releases, positioning it apart from the oud-dominant and citrus-forward releases that dominate comparable portfolios.
