A model wearing yellow gold and mother-of-pearl pieces from the Alhambra collection. Photograph courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels. Walking into the new Van Cleef & Arpels store on Murray Street in Perth is a bit like entering your grandmother’s house as a small child. It’s exciting and welcoming, but there’s an unspoken sense of reverence that lingers over the shiny things, telling you it’s probably best to be quiet and not touch. The French jeweller is the latest luxury brand to join the designer stores filling the Federation-era buildings in Perth’s CBD. City of Perth figures show that spending on luxury goods in the city rose 28 per cent between 2022 and 2023, during the post-lockdown boom, meaning there’s certainly an appetite for showpiece stores here. (The fit-out of the Chanel boutique on the corner of William and Murray streets in 2022 was reported to have cost $13 million.) Yet luxury brand executives know it’s one thing to open a store and quite another to get the location and interior design just right. Van Cleef & Arpels spent considerable time searching for the perfect spot for its fourth Australian store (it has one in Sydney and two in Melbourne), before finally settling on Anchor House, a beautiful three-storey heritage building dating back to 1905.
“It used to be a tea merchant warehouse, and 1905 was one year before the maison opened [at 22 Place Vendôme in Paris], so we really loved the location and wanted to honour what Anchor House looks like,” says the jeweller’s managing director of Oceania, Julie To. “We didn’t want to change too much of what Anchor House was, but we were able to bring a little Parisian flair to it.”
Size matters
Van Cleef & Arpels occupies the ground floor, and kept most of the building’s original details — including classical cornice trim and arched windows — intact. The store has 271 square metres of floor space, across four rooms and ample display cases containing some of the jeweller’s best-known collections, including Alhambra and Perlée, with ballerinas and fairies adorning watches and clips, and classic wedding and engagement rings on permanent display.
“It takes us about a year from the moment we find a site to actually do the design of the store,” To says. “That excludes the build. Every boutique that we design, we really want to make it specific and unique to that store so they have their own character and personality.” Sydney’s store on Castlereagh Street, for example, has an apartment on the first floor with its own private salon, champagne bar, dining room and kitchen. “We host a lot of chef’s tables and collector tables in the store,” To says. “And so when we opened Perth, when you come into the boutique, we want you to feel like you’ve entered a Parisian apartment and you can wander into our salons.”
Products are just one element
Besides the actual jewellery, the Perth store houses a Poetic Salon, a library and a Wine Salon that will stock French wines and, in time, those from Western Australia’s renowned wine regions. “That’s our private entertainment space where we also hope to, aside from private appointments, be able
to host dinners like we do in Sydney, or conversations and talks after-hours as well,” To says, explaining that the idea was to make the Perth boutique as self-sufficient as possible, given its relative isolation from the other Australian states.
The interior decoration was all custom-made, from the Murano glass chandeliers to the gold leaf de Gournay wallpaper handpainted with flowers and butterflies. The French artist Caroline Besse supplied an artwork. “She has a piece of art in our Wine Salon and she created a piece for us in the [Place] Vendôme boutique, so this is the other boutique where she has a unique piece of art for us,” To says. “She uses a mix of Eastern and Western techniques, where she uses Chinese ink with crushed minerals, and she paints on Japanese wallpaper. At the time of doing the boutique, we sent her a lot of images of Western Australia — the coastlines, the beaches, the gorges in Kalbarri, the Murchison River, and we asked her to create something for us.”
Curating a cultural experience
Keeping visitors in store for as long as possible, not only to see and touch the products but to drink coffee, wine or champagne and indulge in a cultural experience, is now a key element of the luxury retail store experience. Dior’s four-level, 10,000-square-metre Paris megastore at 30 Avenue Montaigne, with its pastry bar, restaurant headed by chef Jean Imbert and overnight guest suite, is a prime example. It was designed by New York-based architect Peter Marino, who has created several stores for Chanel, Louis Vuitton in Los Angeles and Bulgari on New York’s Fifth Avenue.
Van Cleef & Arpels recently celebrated Lunar New Year in the dining room of its Sydney store with chef Dan Hong and plans to bring classes from its Paris-based jewellery arts school, L’École, to Perth, as it did to Sydney during Diamond Week this past November. “When we have the L’École faculty here, it’s always great to have them host conversations for us as well,” To says. “We’ve had conversations on the sapphire from a gemologist’s point of view and with an art historian. It was a conversation that our clients put together.”
Clients, of course, are the final piece of the puzzle when it comes to building a luxury store. “It can feel intimidating to come into a Van Cleef & Arpels boutique,” To acknowledges, “so it’s important that when you’re here, you feel the warmth of being invited into somebody’s home. The salons offer a little bit of intimate space if you want to be a bit more discreet and you don’t
want to be out on the main floor.”
This extra privacy, To says, “allows you to take your time, for the world to slow down a little bit and for you to enjoy a glass of champagne with us”.
Lens Position: 2892 
The front facade of the new Van Cleef & Arpels store in Perth. Photograph courtesy of Van Cleef & Arpels. 
The Stellar Royal Oak Perpetual Calendar in collaboration with John Mayer. 
Omega Speedmaster Moonwatch with a lacquered white dial. Photograph courtesy of Omega. 
Photograph courtesy of Omega. 
