The hall and the table are admitted here; the store above them is not. Fortnum & Mason had been in this series since the beginning on exactly that basis — three of its five floors are food and it runs several restaurants — without anyone writing the reason down.
The type was invented at Le Bon Marché in 1852, where Aristide Boucicaut applied bulk buying on low margins, fixed prices, goods the customer could touch, seasonal sales and newspaper advertising, all of which were new. Zola wrote Au Bonheur des Dames from it. Every house in this group descends from that shop — and LVMH now owns the founder of the type and two of its descendants.
The European department store descends from grocery; the Japanese one descends from cloth. Mitsukoshi began in 1673 as Echigoya, a drapery selling cash at fixed prices and cutting cloth to the length asked for, and issued its Department Store Proclamation in December 1904. Takashimaya, Isetan and Daimaru were all kimono dealers first. That is why the food floor sits in the basement and is a theatre of counters rather than a shop.
Two entries are the same building forty years apart: Shinsegae opened in 1930 as Mitsukoshi Gyeongseong, and outlived the empire that built it. And the newest rooms face each other across one Shanghai street — a coffee roastery built to be visited, and a boutique built as a ship, which is really a museum with a café.
| Code | House | Contribution | Record |
|---|---|---|---|
| LHL-S-167 | Harrods Food Halls | store that grew a food hall · Knightsbridge, London — the food halls of 1902, tiled by W. J. Neatby of Doulton in an Art Nouveau ceramic scheme of hunting and fishing scenes that is the reason the room is listed. Sixteen departments under one roof. Admitted on the Fortnum precedent: the halls and the tables inside them, not the store above them | Verified |
| LHL-S-168 | Mitsukoshi | draper that grew a store · Nihonbashi, Tokyo — founded 1673 as Echigoya, a drapery opened by Mitsui Takatoshi in Edo Honcho, in a rented shopfront a ken and a half wide. It sold cash at fixed prices, and cloth cut to the length asked for — both revolutionary, and the origin of the Mitsui group. Renamed Mitsukoshi in 1872. In 1900 the zauri system was abolished and the whole Nihonbashi shop turned into display space, after Takahashi Yoshio saw Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia; in December 1904 it issued a Department Store Proclamation and became the first department store in Japan. Its depachika food floor is the model every other Japanese store copied | Verified |
| LHL-S-169 | Takashimaya | draper that grew a store · Kyoto, 10 January 1831 — Iida Shinshichi, in a shop of about 3.6 square metres selling gofuku, formal kimono. Second Kyoto shop 1893, Tokyo 1897, Osaka 1898. The Nihonbashi flagship and its depachika; houses in Singapore, Shanghai and elsewhere | Verified |
| LHL-S-170 | Isetan | draper that grew a store · Kanda, Tokyo, 1886 — the younger of the two houses now inside Isetan Mitsukoshi Holdings, which takes more than 200 million store visits a year in Japan alone, more than the population of the country. The Shinjuku flagship food floor is the most imitated in Asia | Verified |
| LHL-S-171 | Shinsegae | LHL-S-168Mitsukoshi | Review |
| LHL-S-172 | La Grande Épicerie | store that grew a food hall · Rue de Sèvres, Paris — opened 1923 inside Le Bon Marché, the store that invented the type in the 1850s. More than 30,000 products across seventeen departments. The French answer to the depachika, and older than all of them | Verified |
| LHL-S-173 | Le Bon Marché | LHL-S-172La Grande Épicerie | Verified |
| LHL-S-174 | La Samaritaine | store that grew a food hall · Rue du Pont-Neuf, Paris, 1870 — Ernest Cognacq, joined by Marie-Louise Jaÿ after their marriage in 1872; named for the pumping station that stood on an arch of the Pont Neuf until 1813. A 48 m² shop taking 300,000 francs in 1871; by Cognacq’s death in 1928 the buildings ran 233,000 m² and more than 1.3 billion francs. Art Nouveau by Frantz Jourdain, Art Deco by Jourdain with Henri Sauvage 1926–28 — the building is the reason it is here as much as the trade. Owned by LVMH through Groupe Bon Marché | Verified |
| LHL-S-175 | Printemps | store that grew a food hall · Boulevard Haussmann, Paris, 1865 — Jules Jaluzot. In 1874 it became the first store to link its historic building to a new one by an iron bridge and to install two lifts. The brasserie under the 1923 stained-glass cupola and the rooftop terrace are the admitted rooms | Verified |
| LHL-S-176 | Galeries Lafayette | store that grew a food hall · Boulevard Haussmann, Paris, 1893 — two Alsatian cousins, Théophile Bader (1864–1942) and Alphonse Kahn, in a shop of 70 m² on the rue La Fayette; they bought the building around it and gave the address to the name. The coupole and the Gourmet food hall are the admitted rooms | Verified |
| LHL-S-177 | Selfridges | store that grew a food hall · Oxford Street, London, 1909 — Harry Gordon Selfridge, born in Wisconsin and trained at Marshall Field, bought a six-storey building for £400,000 and sold a new shopping experience: a library, restaurants, lavatories, lounges and reception rooms. The first store anywhere to put cosmetics and perfume on the ground floor — the single most copied decision in retail, and the reason every department store on earth smells the same at the door | Verified |
| LHL-S-178 | Lane Crawford | store that grew a food hall · Hong Kong, 1850 — the oldest department house in Asia and the point at which the European type reached the China coast, seventy-nine years before Mitsukoshi Gyeongseong ⚑ founding detail and current ownership require two sources | Review |
| LHL-S-183 | Starbucks Reserve Roastery Shanghai | destination — a room built to be visited · 789 West Nanjing Road, HKRI Taikoo Hui, December 2017 — the first Reserve Roastery outside the United States and, on opening, the largest Starbucks in the world; still the largest in Asia. Two floors around a copper roasting cask rising through both, bean pipes overhead, baristas working on a stage, a bar serving cocktails, beans aged in whisky barrels and coffees sold nowhere else. Admitted not as a luxury brand but as a format: it is the room that proved a mass chain could build a destination people queue for, and every experiential flagship on this street answers to it | Verified |
| LHL-S-184 | The Louis | LHL-S-183Starbucks Reserve Roastery Shanghai | Verified |