Craft guide
ORBISDEPARTMENT STORES & MARKET HALLS IN PARIS11 stores · curated ORBIS register
Kure Bazaar makes French nail lacquer in fashion shades, adding a beauty product to this Paris department-store selection. Its polish is described as containing up to ninety percent natural ingredients, with the percentage qualified rather than universal. Galeries Lafayette stocks the label in Paris, providing a retail route for shoppers looking for its nail colours.
Paris
BHV is a Paris department store on rue de Rivoli, opposite the Hotel de Ville in the Marais. Its shopping departments bring fashion and goods for the home into the same building, with a DIY department in the basement. The business began in 1856, giving household repairs a place alongside clothing within its long-running retail mix.
Best for Department-store shopping with a DIY basement in Paris
Caumartin / 9th
Streetwear and sneaker department store opened in 2000 near Printemps Haussmann in Paris's 9th arrondissement, at 56 Rue de Caumartin. Owned by Groupe Printemps, it stocks 200-plus brands across multiple floors aimed at a teens-to-twenties customer base, with further Paris locations at Beaubourg, Champs-Elysees and Nation.
Best for Four floors of sneakers and streetwear drops behind Printemps
Citadium opened in 2000 as a youth-focused streetwear concept store at 56 Rue de Caumartin in Paris's 9th arrondissement, close to the flagship Printemps Haussmann department store; it operates as part of Groupe Printemps. The store targets a roughly 15-to-25-year-old customer base and stocks sneakers, streetwear and accessories from more than 200 brands. The Caumartin location has since been joined by additional Paris stores at Beaubourg, Champs-Elysees and Nation, plus outposts in Bordeaux, Marseille and Toulon.
Paris
The Boulevard Haussmann monument — the 1912 stained-glass dome, seven luxury floors and Paris retail’s beating heart. The Haussmann flagship was inaugurated in October 1912 as Bader's 'luxury bazaar'; the dome rises 43 metres over the grand hall.
Best for Iconic Paris department store
Théophile Bader and Alphonse Kahn opened a small Paris novelty shop in 1894; by 1912 it had become the Boulevard Haussmann department store crowned with the neo-Byzantine glass dome that remains one of Paris's great interiors — a forty-three-meter cupola of steel and stained glass above the perfume floor. Galeries Lafayette grew into France's flagship department store: floors of fashion from mass to luxury, a celebrated food hall in Le Gourmet, the men's and home stores adjoining, and the free rooftop terrace with one of the best open views over the Opéra quarter. The Christmas windows and the giant tree beneath the dome are Parisian civic rituals. It is a tourist magnet and knows it, but the dome justifies the crowds. Ride to the top floors for the view, and time a visit for the weekly fashion show if the season offers one.
The rooftop is free and often overlooked in the rush to the dome; go up first, then descend floor by floor with the crowds thinning below you.
Paris
French clean nail lacquer — up-to-90-percent natural polish in fashion shades. Stocked at Galeries Lafayette in Paris.
Best for French clean nail lacquer, up to 90% natural, in fashion shades
Paris
The Left Bank’s cathedral of taste — the world’s first department store, 1852, now LVMH’s most curated address. Émile Zola's novel Au Bonheur des Dames was inspired by the store's story.
Best for Refined Paris department store
Founded in 1852 and transformed by Aristide Boucicaut, Le Bon Marché is generally credited as the world's first true department store — fixed prices, returns, browsing without obligation: the innovations that created modern retail, memorialized in Zola's novel Au Bonheur des Dames, which took the store as its model. Gustave Eiffel's firm contributed to the airy iron structure. Now the LVMH group's most refined store, it serves the Left Bank with a curation notably calmer than the Boulevard Haussmann giants: measured designer floors, a serious book and stationery department, and across the street La Grande Épicerie, one of Paris's great food halls. The escalator crossing under the skylights is the architectural moment. Visit for the atmosphere the tourist stores have lost — Parisians still actually shop here — and leave through La Grande Épicerie with provisions.
Cross to La Grande Épicerie even on a short visit; the food hall is the store's most Parisian half, and its house-label goods make superior edible souvenirs.
Paris
The world's first department store (opened 1852) — and still the most beautiful. Gustave Eiffel designed the iron structure. Designer fashion, beauty, jewelry, and home in an atmosphere of calm, Left Bank elegance. The Christmas decorations alone are worth a trip to Paris.
Best for Rive Gauche department-store fashion and design since 1852
Paris / 3e — Le Marais
BHV's rooftop — Marais panorama, view of Paris's rooftops, and the cocktail bar above the department store. Le Perchoir Marais has permanently closed; the former BHV rooftop space now operates under a different name.
Best for BHV rooftop, Marais panorama, rooftop cocktails.
Place Louis Lépine, 75004 Paris
Paris's flower market on the Île de la Cité, operating since 1808. Covered pavilions overflow with orchids, roses, tropical plants, and gardening supplies.
Best for Covered pavilions overflow with orchids, roses, tropical plants, and gardening supplies
4-6 Rue Lobineau, 75006 Paris
Indoor market in the heart of Saint-Germain — fresh produce, fishmongers, butchers, and a coffee shop. The renovation in 2017 brought modern design to this historic market.
Best for Fresh produce, fishmongers, butchers, and a coffee sho
Paris
Covered market near Place de la République — French produce, quality food stands, communal counters, and an increasingly popular setting for a casual meal.
Best for French produce, quality food stands, and communa
Paris
Boulevard Haussmann’s domed grande dame since 1865 — seven floors beneath the art-nouveau cupola. 1923 cupola was dismantled in 1939 to protect it from bombing, stored at Clichy, and restored in 1973 by the grandson of its original designer using family-workshop drawings.
Best for Historic Paris department store
Jules Jaluzot founded Printemps on Boulevard Haussmann in 1865, and the store pioneered with commercial daring — among the first to use electric lighting, to hold seasonal sales as events, and to treat its building as advertisement: the corner rotundas with their mosaic friezes and the Art Nouveau cupola of 1923, a listed jewel of stained glass, crown the store still. The dome now shelters a brasserie beneath its colored light, and the rooftop terrace of Printemps de l'Homme offers one of the quarter's best free panoramas across Paris rooftops to the Eiffel Tower. The store trades across fashion, beauty — its beauty floor is among Europe's largest — and home, positioned slightly younger than its Haussmann neighbor. Lunch under the cupola and the rooftop view are the essential Printemps experiences; the shopping floors are the connective tissue between them.
Book a table under the cupola for lunch rather than just photographing it; eating beneath the stained glass is the building's intended use of its own masterpiece.
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