Bijouterie Kunz

Bijouterie Kunz is the newest name on this list, and also one of the oldest. The house was founded in 1896 by Alfred Kunz, working out of a small shop on Rue du Mont-Blanc in Geneva, and it has stayed in the same family ever since. What is new is its address in Zurich: a corner inside the Bongénie department store on Bahnhofstrasse, opened after the house announced on its Instagram account, on 19 November 2025, that it was joining Bongénie Zurich almost 10 years after opening its first department-store corner at Bongénie Geneva. For an expat who only knows Kunz from a Geneva trip or a friend's recommendation, that timing matters: this is a genuinely old jewellery house, but a genuinely young Zurich shop front, and the two facts sit differently depending on what you are shopping for.

What you get at the Zurich counter is access to a family business that still runs on the same logic it did under Alfred's sons. Kunz today operates three points of sale: the original Quai des Bergues 23 store in Geneva (1201 Genève), a second Geneva corner called Kunz Rive Gauche inside the Bongénie there (Rue du Marché 34, 1204 Genève), and now Kunz Zurich, on the ground floor of Bongénie at Bahnhofstrasse 3, 8001 Zurich. Each address has its own email address, its own phone line, and its own opening hours tied to the host department store. The Zurich corner keeps Bongénie's own hours, open Monday to Friday from 10:00 to 19:00 and Saturday from 10:00 to 18:00, closed Sunday, which lines up with Bongénie Zurich's own listed closing time of 7:00 PM. Bongénie itself is a large store, a 4,000 square metre fashion department store across from Bürkliplatz, so Kunz's counter sits inside a building most newcomers to the city will already have wandered into for clothes or homeware, rather than in a stand-alone boutique you would need to seek out separately.

What stands out: a family history you can actually check

Kunz is refreshingly open about its own history, which is useful for anyone trying to judge whether a business is what it claims to be. Alfred Kunz opened the Quai des Bergues arcade shop in 1950, and it was run for more than thirty years by his sons Charles and Claude, who split their father's interests between them: Charles, who also had an international career as a footballer, took the jewellery side, while Claude took watches. In 1991 the brothers formally split the business into two separate companies, Bijouterie Kunz and Kunz Chronometry, and by 2000 the two had become fully independent of each other. Alfred's granddaughter, Françoise Breza-Kunz (Charles's daughter), took over Bijouterie Kunz in 2010 together with her husband, Lukas Breza, and the pair still run it. A Swiss company registry lists Bijouterie Kunz SA as currently active, which matches everything else visible online: the brand's Instagram account was still posting in June 2026, and nothing in a search for closures, bankruptcy or liquidation news turns up anything about this business (a liquidation story that surfaces under similar search terms belongs to an unrelated Geneva jeweller, Bijouterie Aubertot, not Kunz).

One detail worth knowing if you like a story with your purchase: during a full renovation of the Geneva store in 2017, the family found about a hundred gouache drawings from the 1920s in its own archives, made for custom pieces (watch bracelets, necklaces, rings and brooches) by an earlier family jeweller, Henri Kunz. During the November 2020 lockdown the current owners chose to revive some of those designs as modern jewellery. It is a small thing, but it is the kind of specific, checkable detail a template listing cannot fake, and it tells you this is a maison with an actual archive rather than a shopfront borrowing someone else's heritage.

Repossi, and what is actually confirmed for Zurich

Kunz's own brand pages advertise a genuinely strong portfolio at its two Geneva addresses. At Quai des Bergues that includes Tudor, Repossi, Stephen Webster, Tabbah, Nouvel Héritage, La Brune & La Blonde, Bernard Favre, Qlocktwo, Wolf 1834, Zenith, Mellerio, Ole Lynggaard, Arthus Bertrand, Scatola del Tempo, Humans since 1982 and Kubik. At Kunz Rive Gauche the list runs to Repossi, Tabbah, Stone Paris, Statement, Arthus Bertrand, La Brune et la Blonde, Dinh Van, Stephen Webster, Ole Lynggaard, Nouvel Héritage, Mellerio, Morganne Bello, Yvonne Léon and Chiara Tedeschi. Repossi is a Paris jewellery house based on Place Vendôme, with workshops it says have run since 1920; Alberto Repossi led the house through the 70s and 80s, and his daughter Gaia Repossi took over as artistic director in 2007, giving the house's designs a sculptural, minimal look that includes bridal pieces alongside its signature pavé rings.

Here is the honest caveat: Kunz's own site does not publish a brand list for the Zurich corner the way it does for the two Geneva addresses, which is not surprising for a location open only a few months. Repossi's own official store locator names Kunz's Geneva shop as a Swiss stockist, but names a different Zurich retailer, Les Ambassadeurs on Bahnhofstrasse, as its Zurich point of sale, so it would be wrong to promise you will find Repossi specifically at the Kunz Zurich counter. What Kunz's own announcement does say is that unnamed "partner brands" followed the house into the new Zurich space, so some of that Geneva roster is plausibly already on the shelves there. Anyone drawn here specifically for Repossi bridal pieces should check with the Zurich desk by email before making a special trip, rather than assume the full Geneva catalogue has travelled with the move.

How it compares, and what the workshop actually offers

Compared with the century-old, purpose-built boutiques elsewhere on this list, a Bongénie department-store corner is a lighter footprint, and Kunz Zurich is the youngest address here by a wide margin. What it shares with its older neighbours is a genuine in-house capability beyond simply reselling other houses' pieces: Kunz describes a jewellery-making workshop that takes a customer through stone selection, frame choice and setting, with what it calls individual advice at each stage, aimed at producing a one-off tailor-made piece rather than a catalogue purchase. On diamonds specifically, Kunz says it grades by the standard 4Cs (cut, colour, carat and clarity), sources stones only in the D to H colour range with clarity from IF to VS2, and has any centre stone over 0.40 carats certified by an independent gemmology laboratory such as the GIA. That is a genuinely useful, specific commitment for an engagement-ring buyer, and it is stated plainly rather than hedged.

What the site does not spell out is the workaday detail an expat buyer usually wants most: no price list for rings or commissions appears anywhere on the pages we could read, no turnaround time is given for a bespoke piece, and there is no mention of an online appointment system, a resizing policy, or how the house handles shipping or customs if a buyer later leaves Switzerland. None of that is unusual for a made-to-order jeweller, and Kunz's site does have a working English toggle on every page, so a first email in English to the dedicated Zurich address is a reasonable way to get concrete answers on all of it before you commit to a visit.

Who it suits, and the verdict

This listing suits an expat who wants a genuine family-run jewellery house, with an archive and a real workshop behind it, without needing to fly to Geneva to get it, and who is comfortable that "new to Zurich" here describes the shop, not the business. It is less of a fit for someone whose whole reason for visiting is a specific Repossi bridal design, since that particular brand's presence in Zurich is not yet confirmed on Kunz's own site and its official stockist list points elsewhere in the city. On balance, a century-old Geneva maison choosing to open inside Zurich's best-known department store, with an English-language site and a stated, specific diamond-grading standard, is a solid net addition to Bahnhofstrasse's jewellery scene, and worth an email before you decide whether to make the trip.