PARIS — For the first time, Parfums Christian Dior is gathering creation, training and heritage under one roof, at 33 Avenue Hoche in Paris.
The location is not far from the brand’s historic headquarters and became the home to its fragrance and beauty activities between 1992 and 2008, after which the Parfums Christian Dior France subsidiary was based there.
The renovated building includes a training academy dedicated to retail, a fragrance studio led by the house’s perfume creation director Francis Kurkdjian and archives.
“This place is, above all, a temple dedicated to creation and education,” said Véronique Courtois, chairman and chief executive officer of Parfums Christian Dior and of its parent company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton’s beauty division, in a statement. “Here, ideas are born, excellence is cultivated every day and craftsmanship is passed down.”
One thousand workers in 30 trades renovated the building between March 2024 and July 2026. Willmotte & Associés oversaw the effort, while interiors were developed with the Dior team.
The glass facade overlaying the building’s front, designed by Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill in 1992, was renovated as well.
Step inside to find Dior’s signature haute couture colors, including “Dior gray,” beige, “greige,” white and soft pink. Other symbolic motifs, including the cannage pattern and lucky stars, appear throughout. Stone, marble, solid wood, glazed lava, glass, metal and wrought iron are among materials used.
As nature — and especially flowers — were key to the designer Christian Dior, plants play an important role in this headquarters. There are 1,775 square feet of green spaces, including aromatic plants, trees, flowers and fruits nodding to those found in Dior’s former abodes.
The ground floor features a reflecting pool, nodding to what appeared in all the gardens Dior designed at the likes of homes Les Rhumbs and the Château de La Colle Noire. Decorative landscapes gracing each floor are reminiscent of his past, too.
Dior himself understood the importance of people connecting a house and its clients so, keeping with that, this Paris campus trains the brand’s employees to be its ambassadors. It welcomes every employee of Parfums Christian Dior and from partner teams with training programs and certifications designed for each career step.
On the mezzanine level one floor up there’s a horseshoe-shaped walkway of the Dior Galerie des Merveilles, or Dior Gallery of Wonders, which spans 80 years of creation with more than 100 items. This will be perpetually evolving. Currently, it includes a trio of Miss Dior amphorae by Baccarat and Saint-Louis crystal makers. Exhibited is the haute couture gown Rihanna wore that was created for the J’Adore campaign, among other pieces, such as miniature Dior dresses and exclusive editions from fragrance lines Récoltes Majeurs and La Collection Privée.
Color cosmetics by Peter Philips, creative and makeup director at Dior, wink to makeup from the 1950s and 1960s. There’s a display of the house’s skin care from the past and present, while other artistic creations here are by Victoire de Castellane, Jean-Michel Othoniel and India Mahdavi.
Gracing walls are iconic photographs of Christian Dior and illustrations by René Grau.
It’s all in the spirit of the designer who said: “All the activities which are now associated with my name were to be found within the walls of the boutique: the stockings, gloves and perfumes, whose rise to fame has been parallel to that of my house itself.”
The Fonds Précieux archive space, created to meet museum standards, is on the lower ground floor. This collects about 8,000 original documents and other elements linked to the house’s perfume and beauty archives, totaling about 5 percent of its full collection.
This is overseen by Frédéric Bourdelier, director of heritage and patrimony at Parfums Christian Dior, who pulled out museum-grade boxes to show samples from the treasure trove. These include bottles and prototypes, fragrance and other product formulas — dating back to the oldest one, for Miss Dior, from 1948.
Bourdelier showed Christian Dior’s first advertising appearing in L’Album du Figaro from 1947, which announced the house’s first fragrance for Christmas.
Find here Gruau’s original gouaches and Hervé van der Straeten’s drawings.
“We can see how René Gruau worked — sometimes he cut some little papers to find the frame,” Bourdelier said.
There are 1,500 silver gelatin prints and a full collection of advertising proofs harking back to Dior’s early days. “We have everything — Eau Sauvage, Jules, Fahrenheit and Miss Dior,” Bourdelier said. “We have also all the secret archives for every fragrance.”
Vintage photos show the Dior boutique from 1955 and Christian Dior’s sister Catherine standing in a field of roses. Two hundred fragrance bottles are each housed in its own box, including a prototype for J’Adore’s first limited edition from 2001 with glass blown by Véronique Monod.
One vintage Miss Dior fragrance bottle, made of Baccarat crystal from around 1950 — used to spritz clients — was only known about from a photograph of Christian Dior in his boutique, but was found and purchased six months ago at an auction in eastern France.
In this space are also housed Christian Dior’s oldest surviving letter, blueprints for the Château de La Colle Noire and archives of the family-owned factories plus the Vilmorin catalogues the designer used to explain his floral inspirations.
Some archives pay homage to Catherine Dior, including a box containing medals honoring her World War II efforts. Three hundred and fifty archives, including original issues of Life and Harper’s Bazaar magazines, record Christian Dior’s debut in 1947 and rise.
One tiny envelope holds a lock of the designer’s hair from April 1913, when he was a child.
This archival room can be used by Dior designers, exhibition curators, researchers, historians and Kurkdjian.
Parfums Christian Dior stores the rest of its archives not far from Paris, in a nearly 3,300-square-foot space.
“We selected the most interesting in terms of creativity, inspiration,” Bourdelier said. “Francis is happy to have everything here — all the letters, contracts, correspondence for every fragrance.”
That includes letters from Edmond and Thérèse Roudnitska’s Art et Parfum.
The aim is for these archives to be used regularly. “With this, we can answer 99 percent of requests,” Bourdelier said, describing the process as “dynamic.”
“It’s immediately useful for creativity,” he explained. “It is the heart of everything.”