Courteney Cox is as obsessed with cleaning as Monica from Friends

Celebrities ADThe star, who played Monica on the hit series, is venturing into the home care space with her new brand Homecourt

By Joyce Chen

When it comes to personal care, Courteney Cox likes to take a holistic approach. Our living spaces reflect and have an impact on our state of mind, so it makes sense to give them the same care as our skin or our body: "Because we spend so much time in our homes, we thought it would be a great idea to create a product that would never it's been done before," he told AD via a Zoom call earlier this month.

Homecourt, Cox's first foray into the realm of home care, reimagines the role of the household cleaner in our everyday lives. The products—a hand soap, a dish soap, and a surface cleaner—are crafted with the same attention to detail as a beauty line, with rich fragrances that one might associate more with perfume or skin care than with a product intended primarily to combat grease and dirt. (Homecourt sold out within eight hours of its launch, but you can sign up to be notified by email when the brand is back in stock. In addition, a hand lotion is scheduled to launch in February, and a candle and air freshener in March). Cox teamed up with Nécessaire co-founder Nick Axelrod-Welk and former Viktor & Rolf marketing manager Sarah Jahnke for this venture.

"I like clean lines and I don't like clutter," Cox said, referring to both her personal aesthetic and that of Homecourt products. Below, Cox reveals the inspiration behind Homecourt's unique scents, her own favorite cleaning tricks, and whether her Friends character, Monica, was really shaped by her own obsession with cleanliness. .

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

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

By passion, do you mean cleaning?

Courteney Cox está tan obsesionada con limpiar como Monica de Friends

I want to clean everyone's house. In fact, I go to my friends' houses and say, "Let's do this! You don't need 75 of those." There is something that makes me feel lighter and not overwhelmed when there are fewer things, but only beautiful things. I like order and I like things to look really clean.

Do you have any unusual cleaning habits or hacks you can share?

One of the things that I do that is weird is I put dish soap in my toilet. And I don't always do it. But it's so nice. You walk in, and it's like the whole bathroom smells good, and there's this suds, and it's like, oh! It's nice to know that everything is clean. I like it a lot, but it can be weird.

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

The scent of rose [for the hand cream] came from when I dye my hair, the girl who dyes me puts a balm with that scent on my forehead. Her husband had used some kind of oil to make it nicer, so I thought, "Oh my gosh, that's a really great rose scent," so we took it and made it a little more layered than the balm. . It smells like nothing you've ever smelled before in the rose category. It smells like a real rose. They are the stems, they are the leaves, they are the petals. I am obsessed with him.

There's another one called CeCe [for dish soap], which is my signature scent. I use two oils and a perfume, and I mix them. Guess I'll have to come up with another scent to put on my body, or now it'll smell like I'm cleaning all the time.

And speaking of cleaning all the time, is it true that your penchant for cleanliness inspired some of your Friends character's tendencies?

It's very funny, because I was a neat freak and very competitive and all those things, those characteristics that people know about Monica. But I don't know if I was necessarily inspired by her character. In fact, I called up Lisa Kudrow, because she has a really good memory of that stuff, and I asked her, "Where did the cleanup come from?" And we don't remember. It's really hard to remember because it's been so long, and because it was such a big part of my character. But I have to find out. However, I will say that I felt very comfortable playing Monica.

Were the other cast members also just as neat? Who was the least neat of the group?

I've been to everyone's house, obviously, over the years, and I find Matt LeBlanc to be very neat. He has a huge garage and he loves cars, and it seems to me that he has a place for everything. He seems like he also likes order. I think they were all pretty neat, although I don't know if anyone is as obsessed with cleanliness as I am.

When you think about Friends and that era, is there a particular room or space that you miss the most?

I miss all the decorations on the sets, whether it's Joey and Chandler's apartment or Monica and Rachel's. And, obviously, the cafeteria. But, behind the cafeteria as well, there was an alley where there was a wall that we all signed. Even our dressing rooms. We changed every year because there were bigger rooms and we all wanted to be fair with everything. But I decorated mine to the point where he was a little crazy. I painted the walls [a deep maroon] and brought in a sofa. I didn't move for the last two or three years because I really liked my room, even if it was the smallest one. So yeah, lots of memories from that time. When I walked into set 24 for the reunion, it brought up so many emotions that I immediately burst into tears. And then I got a hug from Matt LeBlanc and he was like, "Oh, you smell good!" And then Jennifer was like, "Yeah, you do smell great!"

Article originally published in AD US.