What it’s actually like
The Scottsdale Waterfront is mostly restaurants and condo towers, and the shops at the base of it tend to be the kind of thing people walk past on the way to dinner. Paris Optique, in Suite 152 at 7135 East Camelback Road, is one worth stopping for: a family-owned independent optician selling designer frames to a city that spends half the year squinting.
The frame wall is the draw. Paris Optique stocks independent and luxury houses that the chain stores do not, from the Danish minimalism of Lindberg and the Japanese craftsmanship of Matsuda to Cartier, Anna-Karin Karlsson’s extravagant avant-garde frames, Anne et Valentin, Cazal and Dita, alongside Dior, Celine, Bottega Veneta and Chopard. The shop describes itself as a truly independent store, and the stock reads that way: handmade frames and exclusive lines rather than the same dozen brands at every mall optician.
What makes it more than a frame gallery is the lab. Paris Optique finishes prescription eyewear on site, which often means a shorter wait than at a chain, and the same equipment makes Chemistrie clip-on sunlenses, custom-cut to almost any frame and sometimes ready the same day. The opticians also do the custom work: faceted or stone-set rimless lenses, beveled edges, mirrored coatings on prescription lenses, unusual lens shapes, and repairs to frames you already own.
What to buy
A Lindberg or Matsuda frame. The independent houses are the reason to shop here rather than anywhere else in Old Town, and the opticians can explain how each one is made.
A Chemistrie clip. A custom sun clip for the glasses you already wear, made in the shop’s lab, and the most practical purchase in Arizona.
Something custom. Facets, stones or a mirrored lens on a classic shape, for a pair nobody else will have.
A repair. Bring the frame you cannot replace. The lab will tell you what can be done.
Parking, timing and the practical stuff
The Waterfront has a public garage that is typically free and a few minutes’ walk from the shops along the canal. From Scottsdale Fashion Square, cross Camelback Road on foot; from Southbridge and Marshall Way, walk north across the Soleri Bridge. The Old Town guide covers the district, the Waterfront lexicon entry explains the place and the Old Town on foot note maps the loop.
The shop keeps store hours, Monday through Saturday from 10 to 5:30 and Sunday from 11 to 4, and closes well before the Waterfront’s dinner crowd arrives. Bring your current prescription for lenses, and allow time: a proper fitting with an optician is not a ten-minute stop. If you live in north Scottsdale, the family’s second store at Scottsdale Quarter carries the same approach, and the website runs an online shop for some of the collections.
November’s Canal Convergence puts light installations on the water right outside, but the festival runs after dark, so shop first and stay for the art.
Eat while you’re there
Olive & Ivy is the Waterfront’s long-running canal-side patio. Maple & Ash at Camelback and Scottsdale Roads is the big steakhouse, and Culinary Dropout is the casual option on the same stretch. Across the canal on Stetson, Barrio Queen and The Ends hold the south bank.
How it got here
Paris Optique began in Tempe in 1986 as a family-owned optical store with a simple pitch, in its own words to give Arizona the most fashion-forward and luxurious eyewear on the market. It was a bet on designer frames in the 1980s Valley, when eyewear was mostly bought from the eye doctor or the mall. Three years later, in 1989, the family opened a Scottsdale location, and both of the family’s stores today are in Scottsdale.
The Old Town shop’s present home is newer than the business. The Arizona Canal ran past Camelback Road for more than a century as an irrigation ditch behind a fence, until the Scottsdale Waterfront was built along it in the mid-2000s, with the city’s first true high-rise condo towers and a row of shops and restaurants at the water’s edge. The Soleri Bridge followed in 2010, tying the Waterfront to Marshall Way and Southbridge on the south bank. Paris Optique’s Old Town store is in Suite 152 of that development today.
In 2017 the family added a second Scottsdale store at Scottsdale Quarter, in the north Scottsdale shopping district that had grown up along Scottsdale Road in the 2010s. The business has stayed what it was in Tempe: family owned, independent, stocked with handmade and exclusive frames, and backed by an on-site lab that lets the opticians finish and customize eyewear themselves.
Forty years is a long run for an independent optician in a market dominated by chains and online frame sellers. Paris Optique’s answer has been to sell what neither can: frames from small houses, fitted by people, with the lenses cut a few feet away.