Literary Manicures? Kure Bazaar Will Host Them in Its New Paris ‘Home’ 

PARIS — As it pushes deeper into hospitality, eco-friendly nail polish brand Kure Bazaar is poised to open its own dedicated location in Paris.

It can’t really be described as a store.

“I want to create a house, a maison Kure Bazaar,” said Christian David, founder of the French brand launched in May 2012. 

It very much is one. Up until now, Kure Bazaar has had corners in department stores.

“The concept here — everything is around hospitality,” he continued, standing in the vast 2,580-square-foot, two-story space boasting original parquet and rough-hewn stone-and-brick walls that is due to open on the first day of Paris Fashion Week, Monday. “Fashion has played a lot with hospitality — you see Dior, Vuitton, they open a café, a hotel.”

David aims to be among the first in beauty to converge care, therapy and colors. Kure Bazaar is leveraging its Parisian-ness with the location, dubbed La Maison Kure Bazaar, on the storied Rue Saint-Honoré, at number 165. 

“We’re just behind the Louvre, in front of the Comédie Française and Palais-Royal,” he said, adding the Fondation Cartier will open nearby soon. “It’s the middle of Paris.”

The neighborhood has become a beauty wonderland, with the likes of La Bonne Brosse, Officina Santa Maria Novella and Nishane opening nearby.

“Here, it is a collaboration with a lot of people,” continued David. 

Pastry chefs from the Alain Ducasse group helped design cakes made with essential oils, which are on offer in the café standing inside by the entryway. There are also buckwheat croissants especially made by artisan baker Gérald Auvrez, who hand-grinds grains in his shop to make them.

The coffee comes from l’Arbre à Café, a B Corp-certified artisan roaster, which uses beans from its biodynamic plantation in Peru. Other libations include cocktails infused with medicinal plants.

On the ground floor, too, is the full collection of Kure Bazaar’s nail polishes, with 240 stockkeeping units, multicolor pouches and accessories, and jewelry by Marathi lining wooden and metal shelving. Books are thanks to a tie-in with local bookseller Galignani, and the pair of giant red Medici urns are from a Paris flea market.

Up a flight of concrete steps is a vast, light-filled room, with windows looking out over the very Paris scene below.

Kure Bazaar has had ecology in mind from the get-go.

“Nothing is built,” said David, pointing to the vast bookshelf taking pride of place and that was adopted from an 18th-century castle in Normandy. 

“We can have old furniture and create a new space,” he said.

Showcased in the unit will be Kure Bazaar’s Remarquable Therapy Cosmetics, a new range of 24 products, with treatment serums and nail polishes in 14 colors for damaged and sensitized nails. Their formulas including keratin, silicium, calcium and medicinal plants, such as natural extracts of hibiscus and Centella asiatica.

“We signed a collaboration with a thermal water from France, so we will have a lotion for nails for the first time in the world,” said David. 

The new products come in amber-color bottles meant to protect formulas from light.

“It’s like a very specialized French pharmacy line,” said David. 

Dedicated to Remarquable Therapy Cosmetics is a long rectangular granite table at which the new collection can be discovered, doctors might hold meetings with clients or dinners could be served. (Many uses are expected.)

Kure Bazaar’s treatment menu, created for the new location and available starting in October, is completely newfangled, combining body and mind. 

People — up to seven at once — can snap off their phones and settle into plush couches and chairs standing near the windows. Then they might be read literature by an author, have a philosophical discussion or meditate while their nails are being done.

“It’s like you go to the theater, but [it’s not] the theater,” said David. Advanced bookings are possible, through kurebazaar.com.

On this upstairs level, reachable through a door, is a glassed-in room, like a winter garden, where medicinal and aromatic plants — some of which are used in the care products — will come in artisanally crafted ceramics and be sold. 

Another collab for Kure Bazaar is with the Beaux-Arts de Paris school. Its students and recent graduates’ artwork are to be displayed in a designated space by the stairwell, with the first being by an artist who won a competition by envisioning a “new nude color of the future.”

The art spotlighted will always have a link with colors and a forward-looking vision, according to David. 

A new logo created especially for the boutique, which appears on coffee cups, includes an illustration of plants, a flying bee and the two lions whose forms deck the exterior in real life.

Kure Bazaar has long prepped nails backstage at fashion shows for brands including Stella McCartney and Jean Paul Gaultier. Of the new location, David said: “It will be a place where we can prepare more for fashion week and receive our friends. It will be an open space.”

It is one that is to evolve continuously.

In September 2022, Kure Bazaar opened its capital for the first time, to Vesper Investissement, which took a minority stake to help support and develop the business, including its further move into hospitality.

The brand now works with a host of luxury hotels, including Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, Le Bristol Paris and Hôtel Byblos Saint-Tropez.

Kure Bazaar keeps flying high. It just opened with Lagardère Travel Retail in Roissy-Charles de Gaulle, and Venice is next.