Many ingredients in fragrance formulas can be harmful, but there are safe ways to help your home smell inviting and fresh

Most of us think nothing of lighting a scented candle when we take a bath, burning some incense next to our yoga mat, or spritzing room spray when our homes need freshening up. But depending on the products we’re using, we may be inadvertently exposing ourselves to harmful chemicals, and decreasing the air quality in our living space.

The global home fragrance market, worth $7.6bn in 2023 and projected to grow to almost $20bn by 2030, is booming. But environmental and health watchdogs, including the Environmental Working Group and Women’s Voices for the Earth , have long criticized the industry for a lack of transparency about ingredients.

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An warehouse space in the Italian city has been cleverly transformed with original features and a mix of styles

Milan isn’t a city short of personality, but it is short on homes with personality that haven’t already been developed into brand-new boltholes or snapped up by the cool crowd. Luckily for Elisa Vassalli, the area of Isola, northwest of the centre, still has a few secret spaces up its sleeve, which is how she ended up finding her former textiles factory home.

“We saw a lot of apartments, but this one was really different to everything else,” says the interior designer, who shares the space with her carpenter and set designer husband, Davide. The factory was built in the 1930s and they are the first couple to make it their home. “We loved that it hadn’t been touched, because we wanted to have a space with a story. It was very important for us because we love the memories of a space and respecting it.”

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Pressure on Michael Gove to act as householders see bills rise 40% , with many saying that they cannot afford to pay

Some of the UK’s largest housing providers have dramatically increased annual service charges by thousands of pounds, plunging residents into financial crisis, an Observer investigation has found.

Many residents who bought shared-ownership properties built as affordable homes have been sent bills in recent weeks with increases of more than 40%. Some say they are unable to sell the properties having now been lumbered with “extortionate” charges and no cap on future increases. More than 1,000 people across the country are now threatening to refuse to pay.

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From picking a perfect fragrance to spraying your radiators and getting rid of the worst stinks, here is how to make sure your life always smells sweet

From a fancy fragrance to a simple bowl of oranges, scent can transform how you feel about yourself, another person or a place. But how can you work out what suits the moment? And the best way to get rid of a stink? Perfumers reveal how to make your world smell fantastic.

1. Smell is an extreme sensation
“Scent provokes a visceral reaction,” says Ezra-Lloyd Jackson , a perfumer and artist who makes wearable fragrances under the brand name deya and creates scent installations for art exhibitions. What fascinates him about working with scent is the process of transforming “something that is grotesque or alarming into something that is familiar and comforting, or vice versa”.

2. Your reaction to a smell is linked to memory
Maya Njie makes perfumes inspired by her Swedish and Gambian heritage. She tried to capture this feeling in other artistic forms before realising that what she really wanted was to portray the way it smelled. “We know that our sense of smell is directly linked to the part of the brain where our memories are stored,” she says. “So it makes a lot of sense that fragrance and smells are connected to our memories. If you smell something that someone has worn, or you go to a house that belongs to your grandparents, smelling makes you feel way more emotional than a photo ever could.” Jackson describes this as “internal time travel. It is another form of communication that isn’t linguistic.”

3. It is possible to train your nose
“That is what perfume is all about,” says Jackson. He didn’t have a very orthodox route into perfumery: “I went straight into a laboratory and got to work, but most people will train at one of the schools in France, where the first year is all about learning 500 smells.” Brighton-based French perfumer Elodie Durande , who works for Somerset label Ffern, honed her craft at the University of Montpellier. “You start out by working on your olfactory skills, remembering smells and describing smells,” before receiving a wide-ranging education about the perfume industry, she says.

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Dr Omar A Guerrero says technology could scrutinise policy proposals and formulate holistic solutions. Plus letters from a pensioner who was evicted after asking his landlord to fix damp problems, Daniel Carter and Martyn Williams

Nick Bano makes a compelling argument that discussions about increasing the housing supply are misguided if their aim is to fix the UK housing crisis ( The end of landlords: the surprisingly simple solution to the UK housing crisis, 19 March ). His data and succinct description of the historical context are consistent with qualitative and quantitative evidence provided by various UK housing scholars.

As part of my work as a computational economist, I try to understand the connections between housing wealth inequality and the set of incentives that are shaped by institutions such as the market and the government, ie “the rules of the game”. For this purpose, I develop artificial intelligence models consisting of a computational representation of every household and property in the economy (with their most relevant characteristics and behaviours), and the rules of the game that incentivise them to engage in interactions such as purchasing and renting real estate.

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A preview of the Milan Furniture Fair, the latest exhibition at Vitra Design Museum and the relaunch of London’s best 60s boutique

This month’s design news is pretty nostalgic. Jonny Trunk’s wonderful history of hi-fi catalogues reminds us of the world before downloads and the relaunch of boutique Granny Takes a Trip brings back 60s psychedelia. And, as the new exhibition at Vitra Museum shows, looking to the past for answers to modern problems may well be the best solution.

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Vintage, sculptural or colourful, lights to brighten your interiors

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Changes and clever touches mean there are surprises a plenty behind the front door of this Edwardian home

From the outside, Marisa Hordern’s Edwardian terrace in London’s north Kensington looks just like any other on the street. A tiled path leads up to a grey front door with two clipped olive trees standing outside the red brick facade. “I like seeing people’s reactions when they come in,” says Hordern, the founder and creative director of Missoma , a jewellery label that started life around her kitchen table 16 years ago. “Inside, it really is quite different from what you might expect…”

Hordern moved from a nearby maisonette five years ago. At the time, she was single and approaching her 40th birthday. “I decided it was time to lay down some proper roots and buy a house,” says Hordern. “The street is full of young families, and I remember my neighbours asking: ‘Where’s your husband? Where’s your partner? Where are your kids?’ I did feel a little bit like the odd one out, but this was just something I wanted to do for myself. Sometimes you just need to stop waiting for things to happen and do it yourself. I’m a big believer in that.”

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Swiss brand Laurastar collaborated with fashion designer Germanier on gadget said to half ironing time

What do you buy for someone who has everything? The answer, one suspects, is not an ironing board.

But for the big spender who, let’s face it, almost certainly never folds their own laundry, there is a new bougie appliance: a £3,999 ironing board.

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