Ha Minseo Caterina

About

Ha Minseo Caterina is the founder, CEO and in-house perfumer of Villa Erbatium, the Seoul niche house she runs through Science Art Works Inc. She composes essentially the whole catalogue herself, which is unusual - most houses this size buy their formulas in. She came to perfumery sideways. A chemistry graduate of Ewha Womans University, she worked as a fashion MD and in cross-border e-commerce before falling for fragrance in 2016; the turning point was meeting an eighty-year-old Italian artisan running a cosmetics factory in Piedmont, where she went on to train. She founded Villa Erbatium in 2017 and spent the first year doing nothing but product development, opening the Samcheong-dong flagship - laid out like an alchemist's laboratory - in 2018. The name is Italian-Korean: "Villa" for a cultural space and "Erba" for herb, both Italian, with "Tium", the Korean for sprouting. The house line is that perfume sits on the border between science and art, and the work bears it out - natural material extracted from flowers, leaves, stems and roots, each formula matured for two weeks, sold as "emotional perfume" across more than twenty countries. Her best-known composition is Scent of Seoul (2025), made with the Seoul Metropolitan Government as the city's official fragrance: bergamot and hinoki over tobacco and bay leaf, on sandalwood and cedar. Alongside it sit Whiskey (2025), Alchemist (2024), Galleria (2024) and the cotton-and-musk Allegria (2024). She also works to commission, doing scent design for Microsoft Korea, Galleria Department Store, Ananti Resort, Seoul Club and the stage production of Dracula.