RETAIL
Venerable French
department store
Galeries Lafayette
thinks big within
a smaller footprint
PARIS – Family-owned department store
Galeries Lafayette traces its history back 125
years, and has dreamed of opening a store
on the Champs-Élysées for almost as long.
In 1927, founder Théophile Bader bought the
Hôtel de Massa on the leafy avenue, but the
1929 crisis forced him to rethink his retail
plans. Now, 90 years on, the fourth and fifth
generations of the family have finally fol-
lowed through.
Fulfilling a family ambition was not
the only thing to bring Galeries Lafayette to
the Champs-Élysées, however. A huge con-
sideration is the famous avenue’s enormous
volume of passing trade: some 300,000
pedestrians traverse it every day, half of
them international tourists. The new store
hopes to attract 10,000 to 15,000 visitors a
day – an ambitious total, since the flagship
store on Boulevard Haussman, ten times the
size of its Champs-Élysées cousin, draws
60,000 to 80,000.
As you’d expect from the scale of
its ambition, the new store has quite some
tricks up its sleeve. Small on square metres,
it’s big on style – literally, as Bjarke Ingels’
BIG was called in to transform the Art Deco
gem into an embodiment of physical retail
resurgence. ‘The idea behind the new store is
that it is a laboratoire de commerce, chang-
ing the relationship between our label and
its clients, partners and collaborators,’ says »De
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