We have a linen closet that for a time in my childhood was emptied out and made to serve as the “Nintendo room”, containing an NES hooked up to an old Commodore 64 monitor. I still associate that fabric/crafty smell with 8-bit gaming.
I also love the smell of sun soaked dog fur.
Mine is a composite smell of my grandfather’s shed: soil, and sawdust, and wood glue, and petrol, and pipe smoke, and whisky. He was a keen gardener and would often spend the afternoon pottering around the garden, tending to his veggies or flowerbeds or mowing the lawn, then wind up for an hour or so in the shed, sitting on a deck chair and smoking his pipe (or occasionally a cigar) and drinking single malt whisky. Sometimes he’d be reading the paper, sometimes looking through the notebooks he filled with plans and notes about the garden, sometimes just looking out across the garden and being content. I never got into gardening, but I did love to find him at the end of a day at school and just hang out with him in the shed. Often we wouldn’t talk, he’d read the paper and I’d read The Beano. I learned companionable silence from him.
Sometimes I’ll catch one of those smells and it takes me right back to that shed and makes me feel safe and warm and happy.