Shereen Shabnam
Behind a modest violet door in Valletta lies Stephen Cordina’s atelier, a space where aroma becomes storytelling, and scent is sculpted by memory, place, and identity. As CEO and Creative Director of Stephen Cordina Aroma & Therapy, and a perfumer member of the Société Française des Parfumeurs, Stephen has quietly positioned Malta on the luxury fragrance map.
After a visit to his Atelier in Valletta recently, I realised that my love for candles in fact started during Christmas years ago, when a hotel in Malta I stayed in used his cinnamon candles in the lobby – I immediately fell in love with the scent and recognised it the minute I smelt it at Stephen’s Atelier. After a tour of the store, I discovered that Stephen’s work is rooted in nature, heritage, and deep emotional resonance. It has a Maltese signature in every bottle and every box.
From Gozo Fields to Fragrance Vision
Born and raised in Gozo, Stephen’s earliest memories are scented: walking among fruit blossoms, inhaling herb scents at dawn, plucking petals from wild flowers. Dyslexia challenged his schooling, but it sharpened his sensory perception.
He mentions that he recognized chemical families by smell before he read their names. Over time, that intuitive nose found direction through formal training abroad and an affinity for botanical purity over synthetic shortcuts.
Returning to Malta from abroad, Stephen built his brand on natural perfumes, home fragrances, and wellness products, carved from local botanicals and inspired by Malta’s landscapes, history, and architectural heritage. His atelier in Valletta occupies a 16th-century monastic building, once a site for distilling herbal waters, which he chose deliberately to bridge Malta’s past and his olfactory future.
Scent, Story & Sense
Stephen refuses to see perfume merely as a product. To him, every scent is a micro-biography, a fusion of place, memory, and emotion. His “local” lines bear names like Valletta, San Anton, Gozo, and Medina, drawing on indigenous flowers, citrus groves, and even ancient scent practices. One bespoke fragrance he created as tribute to his late mother features aniseed, a reminder of sweet coffee rituals in Gozitan homes.
He describes the creation process as “simmering, testing, listening”, what starts as historic research becomes blends tested over months (sometimes years), refined by feedback from friends and instinct. A fragrance is “ready” only when it transports him back to place and time, and passes the litmus test of burn, balance, and resonance.
A Maltese Signature on the Global Stage
Under Stephen’s leadership, the brand exports 11–20 % of its output beyond Malta — across Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Though still a micro-enterprise, its presence in hotel spas, yachts, and bespoke projects has drawn attention. His membership in the Société Française des Parfumeurs (a rare credential for a Maltese perfumer) underscores his ambition to bridge local craft with international perfume culture.
What makes the brand unique is that Stephen uses Aromatherapy and Alchemy techniques, formulated in a Kyphi Egyptian style of perfumery and merges it again with the traditional pyramid olfactive structure. Stephen enjoys working with newly discovered plant extracts which gives more options to reconstruct a reconstitution of a scent that previously he had to use molecular only.
Of all other perfumers, Stephen admires Mandy Aftel, Jean Claude Elena, Alberto Morillias and most of all his first tutor master, perfumer George H Dodd who was also a Biochemist and has sadly passed away.
Stephen sees the future in experiential fragrance: immersive scent rooms, perfumed architecture, interactive olfactory journeys. He imagines scents diffusing in museum wings, public gardens, and historical buildings echoing Malta’s stone, sea, jasmine, and salt.
“It is not easy to keep the formula the same year by year but this makes it more interesting to the niche fragrance consumers. However, I do use Molecular materials as well and this can give another dimension with naturals. I can use one type of molecular with the same plant family name but each of four plants may have been planted in four different continents. This makes the perfume more Mystic.”
– Stephen Cordina
