Parisian tea rooms' history is intimately tied to the history of the Ladurée family. It all began in 1862, when Louis Ernest Ladurée, a miller from the southwest of France, founded a bakery in Paris at 16 rue Royale. In 1871, while Baron Haussmann was giving Paris a « new face », a fire in the bakery opened the opportunity to transformation it into a pastry shop. The decoration of the pastry shop was entrusted to Jules Cheret, a famous turn-of-the-century painter and poster artist.
