David Seth Moltz and Kavi Ahuja Moltz, founders of D.S. & Durga, at their boutique in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Photo: Martin Scott Powell.By Fiorella Valdesolo /
April 13, 2025
When David and Kavi Moltz first launched their fragrance brand D.S. & Durga, the tagline was Perfume as Armchair Travel. Seventeen years on, the original tagline is gone, but the sentiment remains. For David, a self-taught perfumer who conceptualizes and studiously constructs each fragrance, and Kavi, a trained architect who conjures all of the brand’s design, visual branding, and retail spaces, each scent is its own world, alluding to places great and small, far-flung and familiar. Like Big Sur and the hills above Odessa and the verdant corners of the Yucatán, but also the slender cypress trees of Rome and the crowded stretches of Rockaway Beach in Queens, even a fictional 19th-century barbershop in Upstate New York. That sense of place is enriched by playlists, imagery, short films, and album-style liner notes that accompany each scent, lending it an evocative backstory. “For us, a perfume is like a little landscape in a bottle,“ says David.
No surprise that the Brooklyn-based pair have traveled extensively — they’ve just returned from a family trip to see the Northern Lights in Iceland with their children. And while the places they’ve visited provide ample inspiration, it’s often the act of travel itself that sets off the spark. “I think of travel not just in terms of locations, but as a reset,“ says Kavi, noting that it doesn’t necessarily involve boarding a plane. The Moltzes make a point of approaching their own environment as if they were traveling — like taking an afternoon off to visit a local museum. “We really treat that as a serious part of our work, a fundamental part of our day,“ says Kavi. “Stepping out of your routine and seeing things through a different perspective — it’s so valuable, especially when you feel you’re in a rut.“
That’s why, while D.S. & Durga’s scents nod to locales as transportive as Mumbai (Radio Bombay), the Mediterranean (Italian Citrus), and Marfa, Texas (El Cosmico), the Moltzes stay attuned to revelations found closer at hand. “I feel just as inspired stumbling across a weird plant in Prospect Park as I do being at the top of the Himalayas,“ David says. “Beauty is always just outside your door. It’s all around you. And it’s easy to interact with if you just take the time to do it.“
In the forest outside Växjö in southern Sweden. Photo: Martin Scott Powell.
Foraging for wildflowers and berries in Sweden. Photo: Martin Scott Powell.
David inspects the forest bounty. Photo: Martin Scott Powell.
A houseboat on the Kerala backwaters. Photo: AdobeStock.“Southern India has left a huge impression on both of us. There’s really no place like it,“ says Kavi, who grew up in New Jersey but spent her childhood summers visiting relatives in India. “Kerala, in particular, has this wonderful jungly vibe, it’s coastal, and there are so many amazing spices grown there. You can sense its importance in trade and history just walking down the street. I remember one sweltering evening, David and the kids and I came upon this enormous 9th-century temple — and were told that men were not allowed to wear shirts inside. This used to be quite common in the south, asking worshippers not to show off their wealth or status via their clothing, to ensure a sense of equality and simplicity,“ Kavi explains. “I have family in Delhi and Bombay, and it’d be easy to spend all our time there — so we’ve made it a point to hit one of those cities, see family for a couple of days, and then take the kids elsewhere…because there’s so much more to see.”
The New England coast is a lifelong touchstone for David. Photo: AdobeStock.“I grew up in Swampscott, Massachusetts, and northern New England is still very informative for me. It’s also just home,“ says David, who cites the quotidian terrain of his native state as a source text for D.S. & Durga. “We’re equally inspired by these mundane, familiar landscapes, loving the things that grow in the cracks of a city as much as a perfect field of flowers in the south of France,“ he says. “When we talk about amazing places and beautiful things, there’s this foregone conclusion that they have to be overwhelmingly majestic, like the Rocky Mountains. But where I grew up, there’s a sort of majestic quaintness, a sense of safety in these places — and that’s also magic. My parents’ house has woods behind it and the ocean down the street, and those two smells, woods and ocean, are still my North Stars. I know them in my bones.”
D.S. & Durga’s storefront on Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice. Photo: Jenna Peffley.“I attended grad school in L.A., and spent some of my formative years there, and it has definitely influenced my approach to design,“ says Kavi. “I went to SCI-Arc for architecture, which was started by hippies in the 1970s, and it took a very different approach — more like art school for architects. It was such a cool thing to be part of. In our Los Angeles stores I try to reference and honor the California modernists that inspired me in school, like Ray Kappe and John Lautner. The whole city had a lasting influence on me, and on the visuals for the brand.“ (To celebrate the opening of D.S. & Durga’s latest store on Abbot Kinney Boulevard, David created the Pacific Mythic candle, which he describes as “an East Coast kid’s vision of Venice Beach.”)
At the Tomb of the Eagles in Orkney, Scotland. Photo: Kavi Ahuja Moltz.Not for nothing did David design a scent evoking breakfast in the Scottish Highlands. “The Cairngorm Mountains are one of the most beautiful places on earth,“ he raves. “Windswept and gorgeous and vast…it feels like you’re wildly off-track, at the very edge of beauty.“ Scotland looms large in David’s imagination: D.S. & Durga also has a candle inspired by the briny North Sea air, “green, green grass, and clover,“ and “damp, lichen-covered rocks“ around the mysterious Tomb of the Eagles, in the remote Orkney Islands. “Scotland’s a magical place because they’ve preserved their history so well,“ says David. “The Scottish people are like Native Americans in that they’ve lived on the same land for thousands of years — there’s a deep connection to place, and a sense of stewardship of the land and the architecture.”
The Glass House, New Canaan, CT. Photo: David Seth Moltz.“Philip Johnson’s Glass House inspired our new fragrance Brown Flowers,“ says David of a scent blending dried jasmine sambac buds, brown orchid, coffee flower, and musk. “One day Kavi and I dropped the kids off at camp and she was like, ‘Let’s go to the Glass House!’ We spent the day there, exploring the grounds, and suddenly this whole world of a fragrance began to unfold in my mind.“ David sketches out the backstory: “There’s a woman, let’s call her Simone, and she’s making potpourri and taking art classes, and she plays the synthesizer and dates a guy from the city, who plays lead guitar in a band. He’s her ‘significant other’; Simone would never get married. Simone starts making a perfume with this musk she can only find in Europe, and she decides to call it Brown Flowers, and soon everyone’s obsessed with it. If she can just get her perfumes into Barney’s then she’ll really have made it!“ he adds with a laugh.
Kavi on the East River waterfront, Brooklyn, NY. Photo: Martin Scott Powell.“New York forms more of our story than any other place,“ David says. “It’s our home, it’s where we met in 2007. The only other places we could imagine ever living — and only once the kids are in college — are London or Paris or possibly Santa Fe, because we love New Mexico so much and it just calls to us. But we’re New Yorkers now, despite being born elsewhere, and we’re probably always going to live here in some way. When I moved here in 2002, Brooklyn felt like the Wild West. There were still so many places where people didn’t live yet, like along the Williamsburg waterfront. In Bushwick, there were all these reclaimed living spaces, and everyone I knew was an artist or a musician or doing some cool thing — it felt like Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s. Our brand was definitely born out of that.“
Tools of the trade. Photo: Martin Scott Powell.
The future album cover. Photo: Martin Scott Powell.
Conjuring a new world in Brooklyn. Photo: Martin Scott Powell.Fiorella Valdesolo is a contributing editor at the Wall Street Journal Magazine, and has written for New York, Vogue, Town & Country, Allure, Time, National Geographic, CR Fashion Book, and Oprah. She was the cofounder and Editor-in-Chief of the late, great, James Beard Award–winning food magazine Gather Journal.
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