La Samaritaine

Historic · Pont-Neuf / Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois (1st)Paris,France

A Paris department store built as one great room, iron balconies climbing four floors round a glass-roofed well under a frieze of peacocks.

La Samaritaine is a department store built as one great room. Iron balconies climb four floors round a central well, painted in green and gold, with a long enamelled frieze of peacocks running along them and a glass roof over the top. Stand on the ground floor and you can see every department at once, which was exactly the point. A new front on the street behind is a wall of glass folded into vertical ripples, and it was not designed to match the buildings beside it. Two market traders opened a shop on this corner in 1870 and spent the next thirty-five years buying the block around it, one building at a time. In 1905 they handed the whole site to the architect Frantz Jourdain. Instead of dividing it into rooms he threw an iron frame across the lot, roofed the middle in glass and left every floor open to the well. It has been a listed monument since 1990, which is why the room you stand in is Jourdain's own, down to the paint on the ironwork.

Worth knowing

Good to know

You can walk in and look without buying — The hall is a shop floor, but nothing stops a visitor going in, standing under the roof and walking out again.
Weekday mornings are the best time to see the building — At the weekend it works as a busy shop and the floor of the hall is full, which makes the ironwork hard to see.
The hall is brightest around midday — The glass is overhead, so the light comes straight down in the middle of the day, and the hall goes dim early on a winter afternoon.
The name is older than the store — It comes from a water pump on the bridge, carved with the Samaritan woman at the well, which named this corner before any shop.
Several doors lead to different things — The great hall is reached from the street side, the river front is a separate entrance, and the hotel in the block has its own.

Things to do

1
See the peacock frieze from the floor, then from its own balcony
Go into the great hall, walk to the middle of the ground floor and turn slowly. Four storeys of iron balcony rise round you to a glass roof, and a frieze of peacocks runs the whole way round at one of the levels, reading from down here as a single green band. Take the stairs up to that balcony and walk the circuit: from there you can pick out individual birds, the foliage between them and the joints between the fired slabs. The colour is as strong as it was when the panels were first bolted into place.
2
Walk round to the rippled front
Come out and go round to the street side. The glass wall folds in and out in vertical waves, so the buildings opposite look bent in its reflection. Walk along it and the reflection moves with you. The wall was not designed to match the stone fronts on either side of it.
3
Look at the Art Deco block on the river side
The front on the quay is a different building again, put up in the 1920s. It has flat stone and geometric metalwork, without the curves of the iron hall behind it. About two decades separate the two. The store bought the block one piece at a time, which is why its four sides look nothing like each other.