GROVE England A Sensory Language of Home

Founded by award-winning interior designer Laura Butler-Madden, GROVE England was born from a desire to translate the poignant beauty of nature into something deeply personal. Inspired by life at her
Cotswold home, Grove Farm, the brand explores fragrance as an extension of how we live; thoughtful, sensory and drawn by the changing seasons. Charli Peake sat down with Laura to find out more.

For Laura, scent is inseparable from space. “It’s such an important part of designing a room and a home, those finishing touches,” she says. 

That philosophy became the starting point for GROVE England. “I felt there was something missing in the market,” she explains. “I wanted a fine fragrance, but naturalised. Something elegant and beautiful, but also something I felt comfortable putting on my skin.” 

The result is an elegant collection that moves seamlessly between body and home. “I love that I can layer it,” Laura says. “I can wear it on my skin, and then spritz it onto my pillow. It becomes part of your whole environment.” 

There is a sense of ritual to it all. “If you wash your hands with something beautiful, that smells and looks lovely, it brings a bit of joy to your day,” she reflects. “I’ve always loved those moments at night, like applying hand cream before bed. Even if you’re in the middle of a renovation and everything feels chaotic, those small acts bring you back to a sense of calm. A little moment of luxury.”

This emotional sensibility carries through into the fragrances. Rather than working with traditional blooms, GROVE England is built around botanicals that don’t naturally have a scent. “It was a very intuitive feeling,” Laura explains. “These flowers marked seasonal changes for me: cow parsley signalling summer in the Dorset plains when I was a child, snowdrops marking the arrival of spring.” 

It became the foundation of the brand. “Those were the very first conversations I had with the perfumer, this idea of moments through the year. And I realised that these flowers don’t actually have a fragrance, so how can we bottle that feeling and turn it into scent?” 

Working alongside British perfumer Richard Howard, the creative process is far from clinical. “We literally sit and talk about how we think a flower should smell. We look at images, sometimes bring in music, and then somehow, he works his magic and it just comes.” It’s a process driven by instinct rather than analysis. “We work with a real energy,” she says. “It’s not about overthinking every ingredient, which could take the joy out of it.” 

At times, the results feel almost serendipitous. A winter fragrance set for release next year was shaped by an unexpected moment in the studio. “We had Kate Bush playing—‘Wuthering Heights’, as it happened—on a boiling summer’s day. A sudden gust of wind blew the door open, and everything just clicked. Richard said, ‘I think I’ve got it,’ and when we smelled it, we both just said, ‘Oh my God, it’s incredible.’” With notes of red velvet and soft, dark woods, it conjures a sense of sensuality and passion—not unlike an encounter with Brontë’s Heathcliff on the moors. 

The same emotional clarity defines Snowdrop, the brand’s second fragrance. “There aren’t any snowdrop perfumes, and yet everybody loves them,” Laura says. “It’s been such a joy to create. It really does smell how the structure of the flower looks, but also how that moment feels. Fresh, hopeful, bright, green.” Snowdrop’s scent pulls you forward with an uplifting and positive spring in your step. 

In contrast, Anemone carries a soft, warming and earth-like energy. It settles into the skin and holds you differently. “It’s beautiful all year round, but for me it’s very cocooning, slightly autumnal and comforting.” And increasingly, Laura finds herself choosing between them instinctively. “Some days feel like a Snowdrop day. But when things feel unsettled, I lean towards Anemone which has a real sense of grounding calm.” 

The collection continues to expand in quietly unexpected ways. A forthcoming dish wash liquid, Cow Parsley, embodies the same philosophy. “It smells exactly how cow parsley looks,” she says. “And it performs beautifully. You can wash up four glasses with one squeeze, and your hands smell amazing afterwards.” 

Underpinning all of this is a deep commitment to natural ingredients as a lived value. “I think people are becoming much more aware of what they’re putting on their skin,” Laura notes. “Nature can do incredible things and the performance we’ve achieved with our products is something I wasn’t even expecting.” 

Her own journey into fragrance only reinforced this. “I remember doing my first perfumery course and thinking – gosh, this is so much more complex than I realised.” It has also shaped her perspective on sustainability, or, more precisely, what she prefers to call consciousness. “The word ‘sustainable’ is overused,” she says candidly. “For us, it’s about being genuinely thoughtful and creating something beautiful; choosing the best ingredients, producing in small batches so there’s no waste. I’m not interested in ticking boxes. Conscious is a better word.” 

Everything comes back to place, where life in the Cotswolds is not simply a backdrop. “You see the seasons so much more clearly here,” Laura reflects. “This winter was long and wet, and so Snowdrop had even more meaning. And when the cow parsley comes out and you’re driving through the Cotswolds, it’s like nothing else.” 

It is also, unmistakably, a place that fosters creativity. “So many people here are creating and working for themselves,” she says. “It feels preserved, like you can almost escape into your head here. We’re in a bubble, and creativity flows more easily.” 

At the centre of it all is home. “My garden is always my starting point,” she says. “I’d much rather be outside, pruning or weeding, just to clear my mind. We’ve got four little bantam chickens — they’re great personalities and part of the rhythm of it all.” 

That grounding sense of home is something Laura hopes to share more tangibly with the opening of GROVE England’s first store in Stow-on-the-Wold. “I’m really excited to step away from the screen, to meet people and to be part of the community. It feels like a return to something more analogue, more real.” 

And ultimately, that is what GROVE England offers: not just fragrance, but a language of home. 

As one customer wrote, “It feels like taking the countryside with you”, which is a sentiment Laura holds close. “They said they ran a bath, closed their eyes, and felt like they were back in the Cotswolds.” 

Explore GROVE England online or experience the scents in person: Manor House, The Square, Stow-on-the-Wold, GL54 1AF

https://grove-england.com/