“So today it’s a bit like a rugby stadium but in two weeks we will have a lawn, and then in another two weeks it will be finished.” Jacques Cavallier-Belletrud, the third-generation Grasse-born perfumer, is welcoming me at the entrance to Les Fontaines Parfumées, the home of Louis Vuitton’s new perfumery. Until a century ago, the buildings were home to a 17th-century domaine with a prominent position in the French Riviera town of Grasse, perfume’s capital city. “At least I can offer you a glass of water,” Cavallier says. “Last week we didn’t even have that.”

He’s not wrong about the rugby stadium. Forget fragrant fields of lavender, roses, jasmine or any other romantic notions you might have held about the famous flower fields of Grasse. Mud squelches underfoot. The sky is leaden. The tapping and drilling noises around the 9,900 sq metre estate drown our conversation. The only nod to poetry is the gentle syncopated swish-swish of paintbrushes applying soft grey paint on the doors, punctuated by the mutterings of the meridional painters as they work. It’s Grasse, but not as we know it.

It’s also perfume, but not as we know it. The whispers that Louis Vuitton were launching a fragrance started back in 2011. They became louder the following year with the appointment of their first in-house perfumer, Cavallier, the nose behind L’Eau d’Issey, Lanc?me’s Poême and Stella by Stella McCartney. It’s not the house’s first fragrance, but it might as well be; for the brand established in 1854 there have been remarkably few: Eau de Voyage came out in 1946; Je Tu Il in 1928. Heures d’Absence, its first fragrance, was launched in 1927 by Gaston-Louis Vuitton (the third Vuitton heir). It was presented in a box meant to resemble the milestones that peppered the road on the way to the Vuitton family’s second home. But no trace remains of its smell.