Galeries Lafayette

Galeries Lafayette

Paris, France

Galeries Lafayette. From out here it's a long stone department store, handsome but restrained. The show is inside, and it's free, so go in when you can — walk to the middle of the main hall and look straight up.

Galeries Lafayette. From out here it's a long stone department store, handsome but restrained. The show is inside, and it's free, so go in when you can — walk to the middle of the main hall and look straight up.

Forty-three meters above the perfume counters, there's a dome of stained glass — gold, amber, violet, arranged like a flower opening. It went up in nineteen twelve, built by a master glassmaker, and on a bright day the light comes down through it and turns the whole shop floor honey-colored. Cathedrals used colored light from above to make people feel small in front of God. This building uses the same trick to sell handbags. It started in eighteen ninety-four as a tiny haberdashery on this corner, run by two cousins, and grew into seventy thousand square meters of temple. The cousins understood something ahead of their time — if you make people tilt their heads back and gasp, they stay longer. And if they stay longer, well.

But the best thing that ever happened to this buildi

ng happened on the ROOF. In January nineteen nineteen, the store offered a prize — twenty-five thousand francs to any pilot who could land an airplane on top of a Paris department store. The terrace up there is about the size of a tennis court, with the dome bulging through the middle of it and chimneys around the edges. Every sane pilot passed. Jules Védrines — say it vay-DREEN — was a war hero,

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Quick Facts

Galeries Lafayette started in 1894 as a tiny haberdashery run by two cousins and grew into 70,000 square meters of department store
The 43-meter stained glass dome went up in 1912, flooding the shop floor with cathedral-style colored light
In January 1919 the store offered 25,000 francs to any pilot who could land a plane on the roof of a Paris department store
War hero Jules Védrines stalled his biplane onto the rooftop terrace; bystanders grabbed the wings to stop it before the edge
The police fined him sixteen francs for landing in a prohibited area — while the store paid him 25,000
Védrines died three months later of engine failure on a flight to Rome, at 37; nobody has ever repeated the stunt
The rooftop terrace is free and open to the public today, with views of the opera house, the Eiffel Tower, and Sacré-Cœur

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