Courteney Cox Is as Obsessed With Cleansing as Her Buddies Character

When it comes to self-care, Courteney Cox likes to take a holistic approach. Our living spaces both reflect and impact our overall moods, after all, so it only makes sense to give them just as much TLC as our skin or our bodies. “Since we’ve been spending so much time in our homes, we thought it would be a great idea to start a product that’s never been done before,” she told AD via a Zoom call earlier this month. 

Homecourt, Cox’s first venture into the home care space, reimagines the role of the household cleaner in our everyday lives. The products—a hand wash, a dish soap, and a surface cleaner—are curated with the same attention to detail as a beauty line, with rich scents that one might associate more with perfume or skin care than a product primarily meant to fight grease and dirt. (Homecourt does, in fact, have plans to release a hand lotion in February and a candle and room deodorant in March.) Cox partnered up with Nécessaire cofounder Nick Axelrod-Welk and former Viktor & Rolf head of marketing Sarah Jahnke for the venture.

“I like clean lines and I don’t like clutter,” Cox said, referring to both her personal aesthetic and that of the Homecourt products. Below, Cox reveals the inspiration behind Homecourt’s unique scents, her own favorite cleaning hacks, and whether or not her Friends character Monica was really modeled after her own obsession with cleanliness.

Architectural Digest: Where did the idea for Homecourt come from?

Courteney Cox: It started because I am obsessed with scents, and I’m obsessed with design. I wanted to work with scents that you want to smell whether it’s on your body or in a candle. But why not clean with those scents? And don’t get me wrong, Clorox was really important about two years ago, but I wanted to try using great scents with something different [cleaning products] because we’re probably never going to be leaving our homes as much as we used to. This is organic to me and my passion.

By passion, do you mean cleaning?

I want to clean everyone’s house out. I actually do go to my friends’ houses and say, “Let’s do this! You don’t need 75 of those.” There’s just something that makes me feel lighter and not bogged down when there’s less of things but just nice things. I like order and I like things to look really clean. 

Do you have any unusual cleaning habits or hacks that you could share?

One of the things I do which is weird is that I put dish soap in my toilet. And I don’t do it every time. But it’s so nice. You come in, and it’s like your whole bathroom smells good, and there are these suds, and it’s like, “Oh.” It’s nice to know that everything’s clean. I really like it, but that might be weird.

Speaking of dish soap, where did you get the inspiration for the really unique scents in the Homecourt line?

The [steeped] rose scent [for the hand cream] came from when I get my hair dyed, the girl who dyes my hair puts this balm on my forehead. Her husband had used some kind of oil to make it more pleasant, so I was like, “Oh my god, that’s a really great scent of rose.” So, we took that and made it a little more layered than the balm. It smells like nothing you have smelled before in the rose category. It smells like a real rose. It’s the stems, it’s the leaves, it’s the petals. I’m obsessed with it.