Elie Bleu Ships $20,000 Fuente Hemingway House of Dreams Humidor

The latest collaboration between Arturo Fuente and Elie Bleu, a French accessory company, began shipping last Friday.

It’s called the Elie Bleu The Hemingway House of Dreams at Chateau de la Fuente and it has an MSRP of $20,000. That price includes a limited edition humidor that is designed to look like a building that sits at Chateau de la Fuente, the farm owned by Arturo Fuente in Caribe, the Dominican Republic, that produces all of the tobacco used for the Fuente Fuente OpusX line. In addition, each humidor comes with 60 exclusive cigars, the Hemingway OpusX.

As for the humidor, it measures 14.45 inches x 12.6 inches x 9.84 inches, rated to hold 110 cigars. It is designed to look like the Hemingway House, a building Fuente built that is modeled after Ernest Hemingway’s historic house in Key West.

The humidor was designed in collaboration with Manny Iriarte, who has worked with both Fuente and Elie Bleu on a long list of projects. It aims to replicate the house and its various unique elements of the building including Spanish tile on the base of the humidor, gold inlays for the railings and a sloped lid made to mimic the roof.

That lid uses metal to replicate the look of stained glass, which is used throughout the building, albeit not for the roof.

The humidor also shows various animals, notably a blue-eyed white horse.

Each humidor is handmade in France. Elie Bleu has said that this is one of the most intensive humidors it’s ever made.

The humidors come with an included hygrometer and are made to use the 320g Boveda packs, which are stored inside of this magnetically attached cover.

As for the cigars, the Arutro Fuente Hemingway OpusX is a 7 x 48 perfecto, though Arturo Fuente has declined to talk details about the cigar’s blend. Each humidor comes with 60 cigars, though the cigars are packaged in their own box. Elie Bleu says the cigars will only be sold in the humidors.

These humidors were first shown off during the 2023 PCA Convention & Trade Show last July. In the year since some of the announced details have changed. For example, the MSRP increased from $16,500 to $20,000 and the production numbers were announced as 288 but are now just 144.

There’s also a variety of other Hemingway OpusX-branded accessories. None of these are new models, but they are new colorways. The Elie Bleu Limoges Porcelain Ashtray Hemingway OpusX can hold four cigars, and comes with two of the gold-plated bridges to hold the cigars. This is the same size as the other four-cigar porcelain ashtrays: 9 inches x 9 inches x 2 inches. It has an MSRP of $1,240 and is limited to 154 pieces.

The J-14 torch lighter also gets the OpusX Hemingway treatment. It measures 1.5 inches x 2.75 inches x .45 inches. It has an MSRP of $550 and is limited to 254 pieces.

There’s also the EBC-4 cutter, which measures 1.75 inches x .31 inches x 2.56 inches. It has an MSRP of $250 and is limited to 454 pieces. Finally, there’s also a Hemingway OpusX J12 lighter that has an MSRP of $280.

In the U.S., Elie Bleu is distributed by Rëyns International, which also has a long history of collaborating with Arturo Fuente.

Update (Aug. 15, 2024) — An earlier version of this article misspelled Iriarte.