What Van Cleef & Arpels Place Vendôme is known for
One of the world's most prestigious jewelry maisons — the Alhambra motif since 1968 and the patented Mystery Set. Its salon at 22 Place Vendôme is the spiritual home of French high jewelry, defined by craftsmanship and stone selection.
Van Cleef & Arpels began as a marriage: Estelle Arpels and Alfred Van Cleef wed in 1895, and in 1906 their families opened a boutique at 22 Place Vendôme, where the maison still stands. The address matters — this is the square's romantic jeweler, the one that made poetry rather than power its register.
Two inventions define the house. The Mystery Set, patented in 1933, seats rubies and sapphires so no metal shows — a carpet of pure stone that only a handful of the maison's own hands can execute. And the Alhambra, born 1968, turned a quatrefoil of luck into the most recognizable motif in fine jewelry, worn from Grace Kelly's era to this morning's métro. Between them came the Minaudière, the jeweled evening case the house invented in the 1930s, and the zip necklace suggested by the Duchess of Windsor.
The Place Vendôme salon remains the pilgrimage point: high-jewelry ballerinas, fairy clips, and stone selection that jewelers themselves speak of in lowered voices.
In the press
- Financial Times 2006
How ORBIS reads this city
Best for — Alhambra jewelry and Mystery Set stones.
France.
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