The luxury retail landscape in Paris is seeing some designer changes, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.
While Avenue Montaigne is home to Dior and Chanel, and Hermès's can boast an address on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, an influx of wealthy tourists is opening up new neighbors to luxury merchants.
For example, watch and jewelry group Cie. Financière Richemont spent more than $66 million on a shop in the center of Paris. The investment—Richemont's first with a new real-estate fund—is a high-stakes bet that tourist spending will fuel a new luxury shopping neighborhood close to the capital's biggest department stores.
Leading luxury executives will be looking to the area around Richemont's new building to see if the owner of Cartier and Montblanc can begin capturing a flow of Chinese tourists that circulate the nearby Galeries Lafayette and Printemps department stores. In the past two years, major brands like Ralph Lauren and Hermès crossed the Seine to set up their first shops there.