Yahoo Finance Chaumet Opens First Italian Stand-alone Store in Rome
PARIS — Chaumet is ramping up its presence in Italy with the opening of its first stand-alone store in Rome.
The 1,300-square-foot unit bowed on Via dei Condotti, a major shopping street in the Italian capital that is home to luxury brands including Cartier, Hermès, Louis Vuitton and Roman jeweler Bulgari.
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The LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-owned jeweler’s chief executive officer Charles Leung said Rome was “an obvious choice” after the brand opened stores in Madrid in 2019 and London in 2020, particularly when factoring in Chaumet’s longstanding presence in the country.
Chaumet is present in seven Italian multibrand stores, including Bedetti and Menichini in Rome, and other locations such as Milan and Venice.
“We have been in Italy for many years through the wholesale network so some of our customers know us already,” Leung told WWD. “But we had never been able to have a proper store to really communicate and show our identity, [or] bring our high jewelry collections.”
Plus, there is the 2025 Jubilee, a yearlong holy festival for the Catholic Church that is expected to bring 35 million visitors to the Italian capital.
“Rome is a very happening city because a lot of things [are] being prepared with the jubilee next year, so the city is being transformed as well,” Leung said.
Set in an ancient building on the listed pedestrian shopping artery, the store features a vaulted ceiling and marble floor decorated with mosaics, further leaning into local architectural codes with travertine cladding for the lower part of its facade.
To further blend Chaumet’s French heritage with the identity of its host city, the 860-square-foot retail surface, which comes with an additional 440 square feet of back office space at basement level, features a work of art blending the outline of Trajan’s Column and its Place Vendôme counterpart. There will also be a wall of maillechort tiaras, full-size nickel-silver mock-ups used to fine-tune the volumes of a jewelry piece.
The store will offer jewelry lines such as Bee My Love and selected high jewelry pieces, including those revealed at a Venice dinner attended by Emilia Clarke, Kelly Rutherford, Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Song Hye-kyo and Cha Eun-woo in June.
Leaning into Chaumet’s Italian connection, which began in 1804 when Napoléon Bonaparte ordered a papal tiara for Pope Pius VII, the jeweler will exhibit the Bourbon-Parma tiara at the Rome boutique over the summer. It was commissioned in 1919 for the marriage of French aristocrat Hedwige de la Rochefoucauld to Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma.
“Because Roman customers are so used to things being grandiose, big, grand, beautiful, important, impressive — monumental, even — it was important to show fully who we are,” Leung said. “Everything is geared to show that Chaumet is a very serious, qualitative, patrimonial, heritage high jewelry brand from Paris with a contemporary touch.”
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