Shop of the Week: Cire Trudon
‘Tis a strange day when Marie Antoinette's candle maker meets Joey Ramone. Yet the esteemed French candle company Cire Trudon has opened its first boutique outside of Paris at Bond and Bowery – across from the city's landmarked Joey Ramone Place. As it turns out, though, location is not relevant much: Stepping into Cire Trudon is to be transported. Rustic wood plank floors, antiques and aged mirrors evoke the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, and each sublime heady scent carries you to another world.
The leather and tobacco overtones in Trudon's Ernesto candle, for instance, whisk us to a sun-drenched hotel in Havana, Revolutionary gunsmoke and cigars hanging heavy in the air. With Balmoral, we find ourselves in a quiet meadow after rainfall, the scents of soil and wet ferns rising with the mist. Every Trudon candle has a story and inimitable fragrance, crafted with an all natural wax paste and cotton candlewick, then poured into a mouth-blown glass decorated with the company's golden arms.
Beyond the 22 blended candles, Bond's Cire Trudon carries single scents, various cierges camées (pillar candles adorned with cameos), bustes de cire (molded wax busts honoring historical French figures), room sprays and stink bombs (best suited for the outdoors and "perfume terrorists," says Creative Director Ramdane Touhami). Beautiful French bric-a-brac is mixed among candelabras, snuffers and lanterns for sale. It's an enchanting little shop, bringing new light to the world's oldest candle maker.
Cire Trudon
54 Bond Street
New York, NY 10012
November 2010
Paper Magazine