Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche was the first department store ever that opened their doors to Lola James Harper in 2014. They gave us a huge space for our own living room with our carpet, couches pictures and scents on the 3rd floor under the glass atrium. All of that for me smelled the chic of sandalwood.

19th-century Paris was a bustling place where everything was changing and everything was being invented afresh. The earliest Paris department store to open, Le Bon Marché, was part of this shake-up of traditions. Aristide Boucicaut was a milliners’ son who’d gone to Paris to be a fabric merchant, and quickly realized that there was a market for a new kind of establishment that offered buyers more choice. In 1852 he and his wife Marguerite transformed a simple little shop into an unprecedented Parisian "grand magasin” or department store, with a wide selection of goods where shoppers could walk around and browse undisturbed. Le Bon Marché was born, and the innovations kept coming...