Galeries Lafayette Haussmann

The Galeries Lafayette Haussmann anchors the corner of Boulevard Haussmann with a massive, stained-glass neo-Byzantine dome rising over its central atrium. Théophile Bader and his cousin Alphonse Kahn opened this shop in eighteen ninety-four as a humble haberdashery. In nineteen twelve, they commissioned architect Ferdinand Chanut to crown the building with that glass dome. It became a theater of consumption where light filters through ten colored glass petals, turning shoppers into players on a grand stage beneath a golden canopy.