Department Stores & Market Halls — Founded 1800–1899
25 stores · curated ORBIS register
Christchurch's Ballantynes brings fashion and beauty together with homeware, continuing a family department-store business established in 1854. Stuttgart's Breuninger represents another department-store history, with the German business dating to 1881. Moscow's GUM occupies the 1893 Upper Trading Rows, where glass-roofed arcades house fashion and homeware brands. The Moscow building also contains the Gastronom No. 1 food hall and a cinema, extending its uses beyond shopping.
Åhléns City brings fashion and beauty together with home goods at its Klarabergsgatan department store in Stockholm. This building opened in 1964, following a much earlier company history that began with mail-order retail in 1899. Its range includes both own brands and international labels, rather than a collection limited to Swedish-made goods.
Best for Fashion, beauty and home goods in central Stockholm
Åhléns began as a mail-order business in Insjön in 1899, founded by Johan Petter Åhlén and Erik Holm. The company's early catalogue offered goods for clothing and the home, preceding its later development into department-store retail. Åhléns City in Stockholm belongs to a different stage of that history, opening on Klarabergsgatan in 1964.
The City building occupies a block near Sergels torg, giving the business a substantial central Stockholm presence. Its history records a time capsule placed during construction, containing products intended to represent everyday life of that period. That detail concerns the building's creation and does not turn the present store into a preserved historic interior.
Today the range covers fashion and beauty alongside products for the home, with own brands and international names. This makes the shop a practical option when several categories need to be considered within one visit. Choose a department according to the purchase rather than expecting a specialist maker's workshop. The Swedish history belongs to the retailer, while individual products may have different manufacturing origins.
Arnotts is a department store on Henry Street in central Dublin, with a history reaching back to a shop opened there in 1843. Its departments bring clothing and household shopping together under one roof, rather than specialising in a single maker. The store has changed ownership and expanded over time while remaining associated with the same Dublin shopping street.
Best for Department-store shopping on Dublin's Henry Street
Arnotts occupies 12 Henry Street in central Dublin, where its history began as a drapery and haberdashery in 1843. The business started as Cannock, White & Co.; John Arnott invested in 1855, giving the store the name it retains. Fire destroyed the original premises in 1894, and the company's own chronology records later additions that included in-house garment production during the 1930s. Beauty and fragrance departments followed, while separate gifts and children's departments broadened the store. The present store combines department-store retail with services and concessions. Arnotts lists fashion and beauty as main fields, with homeware forming another part of the offer. Restaurants share the building with Grafton Barber and Nossa Beauty, while Zeba Hairdressing is also among the current services. Eason operates on the lower ground floor with books and stationery. Its concession also covers gifts and cards. An opticians and a pre-owned accessories partnership with Designer Exchange broaden the store beyond conventional department counters. Arnotts is now operated by Brown Thomas Arnotts Limited, although the Henry Street address and the 1843 lineage remain explicit on its current official pages.
Founded in 1854, this family-owned Christchurch department store on Cashel Street carries designer fashion, beauty, and homewares across its central premises and a Timaru branch. It rebuilt after the 1947 fire and the 2011 earthquakes to remain one of New Zealand's few surviving independent department stores.
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
Australia’s grande dame since 1838 — a department store. A state banquet for Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh was held in 1954 in the Great Restaurant on the seventh floor of the Elizabeth Street store (official + MHNSW).
The Beehive on the Dam since 1870 — the Netherlands’ grand department store, its liveried doormen facing the Royal Palace.
Best for Dutch luxury under one roof
De Bijenkorf — 'the beehive' — began as Simon Philip Goudsmit's haberdashery in 1870 and grew into the Netherlands' premier department store; its flagship on Dam Square, facing the Royal Palace, gives Amsterdam luxury retail its center of gravity. The store survived a dramatic twentieth century, including wartime persecution of its Jewish founders' community, and rebuilt into the polished institution of today: international designer floors, a strong beauty hall, Dutch designers alongside global houses, and the rooftop restaurant with views across the Dam. The annual Christmas windows and the September Turbo Rounds sales are national retail rituals. As Dutch department stores consolidated and vanished, De Bijenkorf remained — the country's argument that it, too, has a Harrods. Visit the flagship for the Dam Square setting; the store is Amsterdam's most reliable single address for luxury under one roof.
Book the rooftop restaurant for the Dam Square view, and time December visits for the windows — the store treats the season as a civic performance.
Budapest's great covered market: paprika and salami, produce, fish, preserves, Hungarian pantry goods and upstairs craft stalls beneath the 1897 iron roof.
Best for Hungarian pantry goods and craft stalls in Budapest's landmark covered market.
Occupying the 1893 Upper Trading Rows on Red Square, GUM is Moscow's grand department store, its glass-roofed arcades home to more than a hundred fashion, beauty and homeware brands. The Gastronom No. 1 food hall, cafes and a cinema share the building, and its online shop ships across Russia.
Best for Department store, fashion, beauty, homeware
The Knightsbridge palace — 330 departments, Egyptian escalators, trading since 1849. On 16 November 1898 Harrods debuted England's first 'moving staircase' (escalator) in the Brompton Road store.
Best for World's most famous luxury store
Charles Henry Harrod's grocery, founded in 1849, grew into the Knightsbridge palace whose terracotta façade, lit by thousands of bulbs at night, is London retail's most famous silhouette. Harrods' scale remains its argument — over a million square feet, the legendary Food Halls with their Edwardian tiles at the center, luxury floors covering every category, and services that once honored the motto Omnia Omnibus Ubique: all things for all people, everywhere. The store installed one of the world's earliest escalators in 1898, reportedly offering brandy to nervous riders at the top. Under Qatari ownership the store has been progressively polished into a luxury destination anchored by its beauty halls and designer floors. The Food Halls remain the essential visit: architecture, provisioning, and theatre in one room, and the house-label hampers and teas make the canonical London gift.
Enter through the Food Halls door on Hans Crescent to meet the store at its best first; the house-label teas and hampers remain the purchases that age well.
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.
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
Liberty's London department store brings printed fabrics and clothing together with beauty products and home furnishings. The business began in 1875, when Arthur Lasenby Liberty opened his first shop on Regent Street. Its later Great Marlborough Street building uses reclaimed ship timbers within the department store's Tudor revival design.
Best for Printed fabrics and department-store browsing in London
Liberty began on Regent Street in 1875, when Arthur Lasenby Liberty opened a shop selling goods from abroad. Japanese objects and fabrics helped establish the business's interest in design beyond the British market. Its development became closely associated with the decorative arts through textiles and the emerging Art Nouveau movement.
The later Great Marlborough Street building opened in 1924, designed by Edwin T. Hall and Edwin S. Hall. Reclaimed timbers from ships supplied material for its Tudor revival construction, including wood used within the store. That building belongs to a later chapter than the founding shop on Regent Street.
Today the London store sells clothing and beauty products alongside home furnishings and its own printed fabrics. A fabric purchase and a department-store visit therefore offer different ways into the same business. For someone making clothes or furnishing a room, the textile range provides a more specific starting point than general gift browsing. Clothing and home departments broaden the visit for shoppers who are choosing finished pieces instead of fabric.
Founded in 1842 and selling direct to customers since 1850, Lodenfrey is Munich's six-floor flagship fashion store, mixing international luxury labels with its famous loden and Bavarian traditional costume. A made-to-measure menswear atelier and a large children's department round out the house, which also ships from its online store.
Best for Fashion, department store, loden, traditional costume
An independent Munich department store known for fashion, beauty and a major classical-music department. The Marienplatz house is a long-running Munich original. Established 1861.
Best for Fashion, beauty, and a major classical-music department at Marienplatz, since 1861
Denmark's grand department store since 1868, in the Belle Époque palace on Kongens Nytorv where Hans Christian Andersen once boarded. Five floors of Nordic fashion and design — Royal Copenhagen to Georg Jensen — above the Mad & Vin food hall in the basement.
Best for One roof over the whole of Danish design.
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
Trading since 1869 and on Ginza since 1925, Matsuya is the design-minded one of the great Tokyo stores — its Design Collection floor a pilgrimage, its depachika a museum of edible craft.
Best for The Ginza department store of design
Matsuya Ginza is a department store on Ginza 3-chome in Tokyo, opened on May 1, 1925, two years after the Great Kanto Earthquake. The company traces itself to 1869. That year Tokubei Furuya, born in Yamanashi Prefecture, founded the Tsuruya Kimono Store at Ishikawaguchi in Yokohama after his wife Masu found a ready market for scraps of cloth. In 1889 the firm acquired the Matsuya Kimono Store at Imagawabashi in Kanda and opened in Tokyo the following year. In 1907 it raised a three-storey Western building there. The Ginza store's Central Hall, now called the Space of Ginza, opened to the ceiling with circular stained glass and a floor of black and white marble. A Ryuko Fudoson shrine from Koyasan Ryukoin Temple in Wakayama still stands on the roof. The occupying forces requisitioned the building in 1945. The store reopened in 1953 after the requisition was lifted. A 1964 expansion took the store across a whole block, and a 2001 renewal changed its colour from blue to white. The seventh-floor Design Collection was renewed in 2011. In 2019 the company adopted the phrase Design no Matsuya and marked 150 years. Matsuya Ginza reached its centenary on the site in 2025, marked by an exhibition on 100 years of footprints.
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.
An original Vermont country store dating to at least 1859, Shelburne Country Store still occupies its 1830s building in the heart of the village, selling Vermont maple products, homemade fudge, and old-fashioned candy. The full online shop mirrors its in-store selection of toys, gifts, and housewares.
Best for General store, Vermont gifts, Maple products
Helsinki's granite grand dame since 1862 — eight floors on Aleksanterinkatu, the Christmas windows every Finn grew up on, and the Herkku food hall below.
Best for The grand department store of the North since 1862
Takashimaya's Nihombashi department store brings a broad shopping selection to central Tokyo. The company began as a Kyoto clothing shop in 1831, well before its Tokyo department-store history. Choose the Nihombashi branch when planning your visit, since Takashimaya operates separate stores across Japan.
Best for Department-store shopping in Tokyo's Nihombashi
Takashimaya began in Kyoto in 1831, when the first Iida Shinshichi opened a dealer in second-hand cotton clothing. The trade changed early. The shop gave up used goods for kimono cloth and dry goods, and that decision set the direction of everything that followed.
The nineteenth century treated it roughly and inventively by turns. The premises burned to the ground in the fighting at the Hamaguri Gate. An American trading company called on the shop not long afterwards, which opened an export trade in embroidery and in brocade weaving.
The house ran a nationwide competition for fukusa designs, offering prizes for drawings sent in from across the country. It also fitted the first show window any kimono merchant had used.
The move east came with a Tokyo store in Kyobashi, and the house exhibited at the Japan-British Exhibition in London and took an award there. It later put up the first reinforced-concrete building used for commerce in Japan. The department store still carries that record with it.
Built 1890–92 by architects John B. Spencer and Charles E. Fairfax, the only Victorian-era shopping arcade in Sydney to survive in its original form; restored after a 1976 fire, heritage-listed in 2011.
Best for Victorian heritage shopping arcade.
The Strand Arcade was built between 1890 and 1892 in Sydney's CBD, designed by architect John B. Spencer with Charles E. Fairfax as his assistant, and constructed by the firm Bignell and Clark. Running 104 metres between Pitt and George Streets, it was Sydney's longest arcade when it opened in 1892, described at the time as 'the finest public thoroughfare in the Australian colonies.' The three-storey building retains its original Victorian features: projecting timber-framed shopfronts, cedar staircases, cast-iron balusters and a glazed roof designed to filter glare. It is the only Victorian-era shopping arcade in Sydney to survive in its original form, having outlasted two World Wars, the Depression, and two major fires — the most serious on 25 May 1976, which partly destroyed the interior before a restoration reinstated its chandeliers, hydraulic lifts, tiled floors and cast-iron and cedar detailing by 1977. The arcade was added to the New South Wales State Heritage Register on 13 December 2011.
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