Healing House of Muse & Heroine Opens in Paris
Paris’ new one-stop shop for clean beauty is called Healing House of Muse & Heroine.
The 2,150-square-foot boutique, which looks like a light-filled, colorful apartment chockablock with brands and vintage finds, is nestled two flights up in a building located in the Marais neighborhood. Just opened on Nov. 25, it’s located at 10 Rue Charlot in the 3rd arrondissement.
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Healing House is the brainchild of German entrepreneur Janine Knizia, who formerly worked in the fashion industry for 15 years.
Shifting her focus, she studied in New York between 2017 and 2019 at the Integrative Nutrition Institute to become holistic health coach.
“Then after this, I just connected the dots and said what I did in the fashion business — launching brands in Europe from the U.S. market — I [could] do now in the beauty business,” Knizia explained. “In Paris, we had 2,000 fashion showrooms, but there was not one cool beauty showroom.”
So during a fashion week in 2017, she opened what was billed to be the first clean, green beauty showroom for b-to-b clients in the City of Light.
“This is how it started,” said the executive, who now splits her time between Modena, Italy and Paris.
Her distribution company, called Muse & Agency, today works with 250 stores in Europe.
Backtrack to the start of the coronavirus pandemic when lockdowns began, Knizia’s warehouse was full.
“I had this dream of opening my own platform,” she said. So Museandherione.com was kicked off on July 19, 2020, alongside a magazine and a 24-hour marathon of clean beauty brand founders’ back-to-back interviews on IG Live.
“From Day One on, we knew this was a business,” Knizia said.
She continued running the digital platform, as well as the IRL distribution activity, which kept flying.
Knizia started with 35 brands and now sells approximately 100 of them online. To her, clean beauty products not only contain botanical ingredients but also must have strong scientific backing.
Knizia’s distribution company counts 10 beauty brands.
“I’m very selective,” she said, adding those chosen must have great potential. Knizia cherrypicks them according to gut feeling and works with each label from A to Z, including on EU certification and brand-building, as a consultant.
In September 2021, she set up a five-day pop-up selling clean beauty, with masterclasses and treatments during Paris Fashion Week. People lined up to get in.
“I said: ‘You know what? Now I open a store in Paris,’” Knizia said. But no street-level location felt right. Rather, she wanted to create a different sort of place for her community.
Of Healing House, Knizia said: “This is not a store, it is like our online platform translated into a ‘healing house,’ where we can be very close to our clients.”
She views beauty as a lifestyle and strongly believes that each woman should feel like her own muse and heroine — thus the moniker.
Step inside Healing House and there’s a graceful, curving wooden Art Deco bar from Paris, a tall glass Murano lamp in the form of a tree and a pink ceramic leopard.
“I wanted to bring this special vibe into the beauty business,” Knizia said.
She considers Healing House’s main room to be the living room. It’s dedicated to skin care, super foods — including some collaborations, such as with Maisie Café for olive oil and Elaine Huntzinger for TCM tea — and supplements.
Other brands there include Monastery, natural skin care from San Francisco; Nóttnuit, clean, multicorrective skin care from Sweden, and Shiva Rose, wholly toxic- and chemical-free skin, body and beauty products handmade in California and Oregon.
Exclusive to Muse & Heroine are De Mamiel, which targets daily stressors in a holistic way, and Lilfox that bills itself to be “intelligent skin couture.”
Exclusively introduced to the French market by Muse & Heroine are: Furtuna Skin, the clean beauty brand with ingredients sourced from its own organic estate in Sicily, and In Fiore, a luxury botanical beauty brand with a tagline “perfumery as medicine.”
Alongside products, Healing House carries holistic tools, such as A Tongue Cleaner Changed My Life, a new Ayurvedic wellness brand from Paris.
Knizia found all the eye-catching furnishings in vintage shops from around the world. Used as merchandising units are a wooden ’50s shirt display case from London and concrete geometric rectangular forms stacked together from Provence in the ’40s.
The spacious room next door is meant for masterclasses, retreats, product launches and consultations.
“Something secret, something hidden,” Knizia said.
Perched around the black table are multihued, woven chairs. For the launch, racks along the walls displayed a cashmere clothing collection, including caftans, robes, hoodies and trousers, especially created with a family in Nepal.
This room also housed another fashion collaboration, with Item M6, that birthed lymphatic drainage and detox pants, among other items.
“This is related also to our treatment room,” Knizia said. “We want always to give a full protocol to people. For me, fashion and beauty can work together.”
Through a doorway is that private room for treatments, featuring a magnificent window decorated with a peacock, flowers and branches. The bed is equally colorful, covered with striped, rainbow-hued fabrics.
“In every room, I wanted to create [a] world,” Knizia said.
Three treatments were created specifically for Healing House. There are the 90-minute cellular renewal treatment and cellular detox facials, for 225 euros each, and the 90-minute detoxifying slimming body massage, for 210 euros.
Healing House is open from Thursday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.
