This post was originally published on this site

PARIS — A large beauty emporium was scheduled to open here on Wednesday in the former foundry where Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker” was cast.

It is the second Parisian outpost for L’Officine Universelle Buly — a three-year-old luxury cosmetics company founded by the kinetic French entrepreneur Ramdane Touhami. The 2,000-square-foot space in the Marais district will include a 19th-century-style boutique selling the brand’s aromatic potions, powders, soaps and perfumes.

It will also house a Japanese florist specializing in delicate dried arrangements and Café Tortoni, a revival of the famed Belle Époque coffeehouse on the Boulevard des Italiens, offering house-blended hot chocolate, homemade ice cream and, in homage to Marcel Proust, madeleines.

But it will not be simply a retail space.

If all goes according to plan, it will be the cornerstone of a new sort of European luxury group — one that, like those anchored by Hermès, Cartier and Louis Vuitton, is rooted in the French Empire but reaches far beyond the traditional product segments of apparel, leather goods, watches and jewelry.

“For me, luxury is not only leather handbags and clothes,” Mr. Touhami said while having an espresso at a cafe counter. He was wearing a khaki jacket, T-shirt, white baggy pants, vibrant orange socks, Birkenstocks and taqiyah skullcap. Luxury, he said, is “calligraphy, fine food, beautiful décor, authentic details and working with artisans.”

It has “one foot in the past,” he added, “and one foot in the future.”

The group, named Honmono (for the Shinto philosophy, meaning “the real product”) is off to a lightning start. The five-star Hôtel de Crillon, also scheduled to reopen on Wednesday after a four-year renovation, will have an extensive range of Buly amenities in each bedroom — a major coup for the brand.

Mr. Touhami is planning to roll out Café Tortoni branches in China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan and to open 30 more Buly boutiques worldwide in the next year. He also said he was in negotiations with a major luxury group that wants to invest in the enterprise.

“The world wants Paris,” Mr. Touhami said. “And we sell Paris: a fantasy of Paris.”

That Mr. Touhami is the force behind this luxury paradigm is perhaps the most startling development of all. A former skateboard kid, he has had his hands in nearly every sort of business in the last 25 years, from reality television to Cire Trudon, the French manufacturer of wax once beloved by royalty. He said his ambition had been driven primarily by three basic requisites: “inciting revolution,” “having fun” and “meeting beautiful girls.”

Even now — at a relatively more-settled 42 and married to the French aristocrat Victoire de Taillac-Touhami, who runs Buly with him — Mr. Touhami is not your typical luxury brand executive. He speaks so quickly that he can leave his listeners downright dizzy, and he infuses all that he does with this same manic energy.

His biography reads like a piece of wild fiction, though he swears it’s all true. He is the grandson of a Moroccan hero and son of an apple picker in the Tarn-et-Garonne region of France (“I grew up in apple orchards,” he said), and he dropped out of technical school at 17.

He had introduced a T-shirt brand called Teuchiland — riffing on the Timberland logo with a reference to cannabis — that was a youth sensation, and building that business seemed much more interesting than studying. Yet it all ended abruptly, he said, when a gang in Toulouse “kidnapped me, tortured me and stole all my money.”

Mr. Touhami fled to Paris, where he spent a year without a home. “I slept in public toilets, in the Métro,” he said matter-of-factly. “And I still hate dogs.” In an altercation with another vagrant, he said, he was stabbed and has a 10-inch scar down his shin to prove it. “I almost bled out,” he said. “When you almost die, you embrace life.”

He “left homelessness,” as he puts it somewhat cryptically, when he fell for a cute girl. Not long after, he started skateboarding, and founded King Size, a skatewear and skateboard company, in partnership with a local manufacturer.

He sold it in 1997, and cooked up a variety of other projects, including in 1998 co-hosting a French reality television program called “Strip-Tease,” which chronicled the intersection of hip-hop and middle-class life, and he opened L’Épicerie, a concept store with his friend the designer Jeremy Scott, who was based in Paris at the time. But it did not last long.

“We lost an enormous amount of money, which wasn’t ours, so we didn’t care,” Mr. Touhami said. “We had a lot of fun and we met a lot of girls.”

Mr. Touhami spent time in Japan, where he rebooted the fashion retail brand And A, returned to Europe to work as the men’s wear director for Liberty in London, and, later, in Paris, created Résistance, a streetwear line that paid homage to the Black Panther Party.

“I went to see other mysterious movements, like the Zapatistas and Hezbollah. I met all the crazy men of the world,” he said, proudly. “We were anarchists! We thought it was fun!”

In 1999 he met Ms. de Taillac, a French public relations executive and one of four sisters (another is the jeweler Marie-Hélène de Taillac). The couple married a decade later in a multiday party at the Taillacs’ Gascony chateau, Luxeube, not 20 miles from where Mr. Touhami grew up. Today, the Touhamis have three children.

Over the years, they have lived in Jaipur, India; New York; Tangier, Morocco (where Mr. Touhami owned a cafe and had a donkey polo club); and, most recently, Tokyo. This summer, they are returning to Paris and their Left Bank contemporary duplex perched atop a historic building where, he noted with glee, the legendary French finance minister Colbert once lived.

The idea for Buly came to him after he read Honoré de Balzac’s 1837 novel “César Birotteau,” about a celebrity Parisian perfumer who loses his fortune in real estate speculation. Mr. Touhami was so seduced by the tale that he researched it and discovered that the title character was based on a French fragrance tycoon named Jean-Pierre Bully, who sold skin tonic called Vinaigre de Bully.

Mr. Touhami acquired the name and, after tweaking the spelling, dreamed up a new iteration of the brand — similar in spirit to the old-school operations Penhaligons in London and Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Italy.

He found an all-white art gallery on the Rue Bonaparte that, with the help of artisans, he transformed into a fin-de-siècle dream of handmade oak cabinetry, antique glass vitrines, Bénou marble counters, terra cotta floors and a swan-beak faucet and sink that “we pulled out of a St. Petersburg palace,” he said.

There, as well as in his other one-of-a-kind shops in Taipei and Seoul and shops-within-shops at Dover Street Market in London and Bergdorf Goodman in New York, Mr. Touhami offers more than 700 products, including botanical-based masks and scrubs, and toothpastes, all without parabens, phenoxyethanol or silicone.

He says his sales staff, elegant young women and men in neat navy suits, have been trained by a protégé of the head of protocol for the emperor of Japan. “The best service in the world is in Japan,” Mr. Touhami said. “That is what we master and offer.”

Items are personalized for clients on the spot, including monogrammed soaps and made-to-order potpourri. “We want to disrupt the beauty business the same way the food business was disrupted 20 years ago,” he said. “We aren’t some big corporation raking in profits. We don’t care about money. We want to change the philosophy of the industry.” Still, Buly is by all accounts a highly profitable business, though it does not release sales figures.

He and Ms. de Taillac-Touhami have also produced “An Atlas of Natural Beauty,” a thick, richly illustrated encyclopedia detailing their doctrine, which will be published by Ebury Press in Britain in September.

To celebrate, the Touhamis are planning an empire-themed dinner for 50 in the National Archives building in Paris, inspired in part by the “Grand Dictionnaire de Cuisine,” Alexandre Dumas’s treatise on the art of dining, and in part by a summer feast hosted in the early 1800s by the French diplomat and gourmand Talleyrand and prepared by Marie-Antoine Carême, who was generally considered one of the world’s first celebrity chefs. Christofle is to lend antique tableware; the chef Daniel de la Falaise will oversee the cuisine.

“There will be things en gelée, and classic patisserie,” Mr. Touhami said.

And then there will be more projects. “I sell one to pay for the next,” he said. “It’s right to do everything, because then you know how to do everything.”