Artertre
Artertre is a French family company, founded in the 1980s, that describes itself as the last manufacturer of miniature Eiffel Towers still working in France. Its towers are cast in its own workshop from recycled Zamak, a zinc alloy, using molds made by hand by its artisans. Clipperton imports the 35 cm model, the largest in the range, as a decorative object.
The workshop
Artertre presents itself as the last French maker of Eiffel Towers, and the claim rests on a simple fact: it still casts them itself. Created in the 1980s, the family firm has held on to the craft of casting metal miniatures at home, in its own atelier, for around forty years. Its towers are struck in Zamak, a zinc alloy, and the company now casts them in recycled metal. The molds are the heart of the business: original hand-made molds carved by the company's artisans, which is what gives the latticework of the tower its precision from the four feet to the antenna.
That care has earned Artertre a place in the shops that are fussiest about what they sell in the name of Paris. It supplies the Galeries Lafayette, the boutiques of the Centre des monuments nationaux at sites such as the Arc de Triomphe, the Lagardère travel-retail shops in airports and railway stations, with which it has worked for more than twenty years, and some two hundred boutiques in Paris. For the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games it was an official licensed supplier.
The workshop's range has grown beyond the tower itself to other Paris souvenirs, from mugs, bowls and plates to snow globes, keyrings and coasters, but the miniature Eiffel Tower, in several sizes and in bronze or antique-silver finishes, remains what the company is known for.
What they make
Clipperton carries a single Artertre piece: the Eiffel Tower Decoration, a metal figurine 34.5 cm high, cast and finished in France. It is the largest model of the range, substantial enough to stand on a mantelpiece, a desk or a shop counter, and detailed enough to read as the real thing from across the room. A gift for anyone who loves Paris, or a small piece of France to keep at home.
- Eiffel Tower Decoration, metal, 34.5 cm
It lives in the Artertre collection.
Why Clipperton chose them
Clipperton is a family importer of French goods, and almost everything we bring over is food. The Eiffel Tower is the one exception we allow ourselves, and only because we found a maker that still casts it in France. We had no interest in offering a souvenir that merely says Paris on the box; we wanted the object itself to be as authentic as the nougat, the salt and the olive oil beside it. A family workshop that has been making Eiffel Towers for forty years, and that the great Paris stores trust for their own shelves, fits our idea of a producer exactly.
