Perfume Storage

A few years ago there was an article in Allure about Donatella Versace and her perfume collection. It has been haunting perfume nuts ever since, and even more so after Vogue published a photo of (what I assume to be) part of this collection, which you can see in this Blogdorf Goodman post. For many of us it's not so much about the bottles as it is about the display.

Perfume storage has always been a popular topic on the discussion boards. Do you keep the boxes? How do you control the temperature in the room? How do you protect the precious ones from light? Bottles and boxes come in so many sizes it's hard to find a good storage system that accommodate them all. And as I've long discovered, a deep cabinet swallows the bottles up and makes it hard to find what you're looking for at a given moment.

Donatella would never approve of my recent discovery. I can't even say I approve of these Ikea cabinets, which aren't exactly an example of the highest craftsmanship or quality material (that was my way of saying they are pretty crappily made, and my husband wants to add: a pain to assemble and mount to the wall). But for what they are and for what they cost, the Bertby cabinets do a good job of housing most of my perfumes and not looking half bad. I still use my old unit to store most of the vintage bottles, minis, odds and ends (and the entire stash of backup bottles), but most of my perfumes live happily on these shelves, originally meant for media storage. The shelves' height is adjustable, so you can customize the display as needed. Even when storing the tallest bottles (I think the Ormonde Jayne box holds the record), I could still fit all nine glass shelves in the cabinet and get the most of it.

While I still hope to either get a custom-made furniture at some point or find a fabulous antique (I've been searching high and low for the last couple of years), I have to admit I already bought a backup Bertby, planning for a future expansion of the collection. Uncle Serge is still churning the juice, after all.