Paris: Favourite Shopping Addresses on the Rive Gauche

The Most famous département stores in Paris are a stopping point on all touristic itineraries.

Aristide Boucicaut is one of the pioneers of creating the département store, opening “Au Bon Marché” in 1852. Since then the phenomenon of this style of shopping has become an integral part of life in France. Au Bon Marche would become ‘Le bon Marche’ in 2012 and it’s the epitome of French Luxury Shopping. Besides the famous Bon Marche, you have a myriad choices for a unique shopping experience while in Paris.

Here are two of my favourite addresses:

Officine Universelle Buly Saint-Germain-des-Près
6, rue Bonaparte 75006 Paris, France

La Maison Bully opened its doors in 1803, in the elegant Rue Saint-Honoré. They have the most refined selection of beauty products: a signature pommade concrète hand cream, handmade soaps, dried peony petals for the bathtub, marble candles, essential oils, the watercolor painted ceramic bottles of water-based perfumes and soaps, all made in the tradition of nineteenth-century craftsmanship, and everything carefully presented with a touch of Parisian savoir-faire.

(Read more about this shop here.)

Above images: all via @dana_tole

Deyrolle: A Parisian Cabinet of Curiosities
46 Rue du Bac, 75007 Paris, France

“Deyrolle is a Noah’s Ark where animals like to be next to each other. They have no animosity, no antagonism,” says its owner, Prince Louis Albert de Broglie, a former banker who bought the shop in 2001.

“Deyrolle for me is a temple of observation”, he says. “You cannot observe plants, animals, ecosystems without trying to understand how they relate to each other and cooperate with each other. By destroying the ecosystem we are destroying ourselves at the end of the day”, he says. (how to spend it)

The first floor of the space is filled with an extraordinary collection of taxidermy: polar bears, lions, giraffes, hyenas, cheetahs and birds, cupboards stacked with boxes of spiders, beetles, butterflies and other creatures which have have died of natural causes in zoos and parks.

Above images: A Lovely Being & Unfolded

via French Garden House