A house’s characteristic smell persists long after the habits that produced it cease.

Evidence

It was odd that, twenty years later, after so much had changed, the smell in the house should be the same. It is conceivable that it was all to do with habit, using the same soaps, the same detergents, the same perfumes and aftershave lotions, cooking the same food in the same way, coming home from the same job and doing the same things in the afternoons and evenings. If you worked on cars, there would be traces of oil and white spirit, metal and exhaust fumes in the smell, if you collected old books, there would be traces of yellowing paper and old leather in the smell, but in a house where all previous habits had stopped, where people had died off, and those left were too old to do what they used to do, what about the smell in these houses, how could it be unchanged? Were the walls impregnated with forty years of living, was that what I could smell every time I stepped inside? — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 2444

Categorization

• QUESTION: Is there any material science behind smells lingering in plaster, wood, and fabric over decades? Worth chasing.
• SEED: A meditation/essay on smell as the archive of domestic life, more durable than the people who made it.