What Houbigant is known for
The 1775 house that perfumed Marie-Antoinette — Quelques Fleurs, the first true floral bouquet. Fougère Royale (1882) established the fougère fragrance family. the house had no standalone store for more than 70 years before the 2025 François 1er boutique.
Houbigant traces its lineage to 1775, when the twenty-three-year-old Jean-Francois Houbigant opened a modest perfumery shop at 57 Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honore in Paris, later renumbered 19 when the street was reorganized in 1806. He marked the storefront with the emblem of a basket of flowers, a symbol the house retained for generations. Houbigant's fragrances passed through some of the era's most storied hands: Marie-Antoinette is recorded as having carried vials of Houbigant scent in her corsage on the day of her execution in 1793, and the house later supplied Napoleon Bonaparte and Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia. In 1912, Houbigant introduced Quelques Fleurs, credited as the first true multi-floral bouquet fragrance -- a departure from the single-note or herb-blended perfumes that had preceded it, and an innovation that reshaped how floral fragrances were composed for decades afterward. After a fifty-year absence from its home city, Houbigant Paris (now under the Perris Group) returned to French retail in 2025 with an 80-square-metre flagship boutique at 62 Rue Francois 1er, steps from the Champs-Elysees between Avenue Montaigne and Avenue George V, alongside a companion boutique in Cannes. Both stock the historic Houbigant fragrance line together with the Perris Monte Carlo, Perris Portofino, and Perris Swiss Laboratory ranges.
How ORBIS reads this city
Best for — French perfumes and revived Houbigant fragrance classics
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Where next
- Histoires de Parfums — Paris
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