Où avez-vous acheté ça?” In 2022, my wife and I moved to the Medieval village Les Arcs, in Provence, France. I’m asking our neighbor where she bought her new refrigerator. “Amazon!” she replies, with a knowing grin. I tell her I need a store where I can examine appliances in person. “Le Boulanger, Monsieur Li.” And with that, my initiation to French big-box retail begins.

Much of the Provençal life that people imagine, and that I briefly experienced in my youth, is still here, marked by quaint stone villages, seasonal customs, a slower lifestyle, and an agrarian landscape. This encouraged us to move here, two architects looking to refresh after decades of living and working in Los Angeles. But now, coming up on two years, I’ve discovered that much of the American lifestyle also exists here: expanding suburban housing developments, SUVs … and big box stores. Growing populations need to be housed and filled with competitively priced goods that seemingly only big-box retail, with its economy of scale can provide. There is perhaps a growth logic that escapes borders. But does the growth pattern vary here? 

So we hop into our car and head to our nearest Boulanger. The big-box shopping experience here starts on the road, as there are few street grids in this part of Provence. The rationale for the grid’s continued use in America—providing clean parcels for private development and efficiency for the automobile—did not exist in the days when many of these rustic settlements were built and travel was by horse or foot, and transport by donkey. Thus, the American grid is replaced by the roundabout—the logical geometric means to redistribute cars on converging roads of varying angles. It also means that one cannot stop at a traffic intersection to look for a store.

In my search for Boulanger along the feeder road in Puget-sur-Argens, it also doesn’t help that the tall pylon signage found in America is noticeably absent. Such markers are perhaps rendered useless here by the curved streets that eliminate the grid’s long view corridors. To compensate, retail buildings, with their large, affixed signs seen from the oblique, are pushed up closer to the road for increased visibility, forming a jumbled morass. I cannot see where to turn off. Being frantically pushed along, we revert to our phone. As opposed to America, where access to big box retail is provided by signaled traffic intersections for regimented flow, access to French big box is a jostling affair of roundabouts. Too late—we’ve missed the exit to Boulanger and need to circle around again. 

Off the feeder road, we encounter secondary roundabouts where we can slow down and get our bearings. From here, I can survey the stores and, more important, see where to park. In America, parking is generally seen first. But the general lack of “front yard” parking in French big boxes, due to buildings encroaching upon the street for increased visibility, relegates most parking to the “back.” Thus these secondary roundabouts are the “doors” to French big box centers, the feeder roads merely bypasses. In America, the strip boulevard does both. 

Entering the parking, I notice the less-efficient stall patterns. The radial plots, the geometric result of planning off a circle, do not easily accommodate the angles of stalls and drive aisles, frustrating my search for available parking. But there is an environmental advantage to the French approach. While the grid enlarges one’s perception of a big-box complex’s overall size, the more radial arrangement here allows buildings to better adapt their positioning to the varying terrain, reducing grading and increasing optimization of land constraints. 

Approaching Boulanger, I am struck by how sleek it looks. It could almost be an exiled store from a high-end mall. With its slick metal panels, large panes of flush glass, and large, orange sans-serif logo, its polished image foretells the character of the electronics and appliances within. Though the bog-box typology may be utilitarian, I feel an attempt here to lend that DNA a contemporary guise. Entering through frameless motion-sensored sliding glass doors that open with an almost inaudible hiss, we are faced with the big-box size, but tamed by a more human scale. I am immediately struck by the seemingly high levels of ambient lighting, curated displays, and wider aisles, which encourage me to browse, as opposed to the find-and-exit expediency I feel in American big boxes.

I can also perceive the overall space; this is a big experience, but not a crowded one. Over time, I have come to realize that not all French big boxes offer Boulanger’s experience, but I offer this comparison. In the U.S., when one enters a Home Depot, one cannot help but notice how it is a warehouse for retail, with products densely stacked on numerous rows of similar metal racks piled up seemingly to the ceiling, dimming the light and requiring rolling stairs to reach the top shelves. The first impression is that of quantity, an excess of choices, and that character is maintained throughout. Its French counterpart, Leroy Merlin, is more like retail within a big box. Though one can anticipate the scale of choices from the building’s size, this expectation is tempered inside. Variously scaled display systems mark different departments, and the presentations are kept at a lower height, with most things within arm’s reach, thus lending a more personal dimension, plus better lighting. Large products are often displayed where one can inspect them without having to exert much energy. And there is also more space between products, thereby avoiding the crammed density in its American peer. This French big-box experience is more akin to a large department store than a warehouse. It is a less honest, but a more pleasant, proposition.

In thinking about the differences between American and French big box, my mind migrates to how this might reveal the differences between American and French modernity. American Modernism initially adhered more to notions of function and honesty, whereas the French version, rhetoric aside, preferred to explore more human—and therefore more idiosyncratic—experiences. This may explain why the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe gained a larger foothold in America than that of his Modernist counterpart, Le Corbusier. When both were practicing in Europe, Modernism was as much a social project as it was an aesthetic one. But arriving on the shores of America, Modernism became stripped of much of its social underpinnings and became codified and rationalized for ease and speed of dissemination. This was perhaps due to the vast size of America’s land and market. Conversely, the latter half of Le Corbusier’s architecture portfolio (and Mies’ early European work) reflects a preoccupation with the qualities of scale, proportion, tactility, and maybe even contradiction; more human and less machine. 

And as these two modernist trajectories evolved within a more interconnected world, they may have met at the place of spectacle. But even here one senses a difference—the American architectural spectacle being more about entertainment, the French striving for the heroic. One feels this when experiencing the novel forms of Frank Gehry set against the dramatic gestures of Jean Nouvel. And that difference is, however faintly, hinted at when I see all the sans-serif block letters and contemporary graphics that adorn big boxes here, or walk into the 10-meter-high entry pavilion at my local Leroy Merlin, vast and empty but for its clean, daylit, polished concrete floor, knowing that in America such a space, if it existed at all, would be brimming with products to further distract customers with more choices. Differences may be as much about what one adds as what one leaves behind.

But French big-box commerce will remain as long as the search for lower prices continues. They are necessary for the many who live here. Their back-of-house function contributes to the continuation of the front-of-house Provençal lifestyle. While this back-of-house is usually concentrated in areas adjacent to major auto routes, as it is in America, for ease of product transport and cheaper land, the front-of-house historic settlements, in contrast to many American suburbs, are removed from such spaces to maintain their character and integrity. Natural landscape separates the two ecosystems, and if that remains, both can continue to coexist here in a state of mutual dependance.

I’ve discovered that the difference between the “new world” and the “old world” is not that the latter lacks the former, but that it has both, the result of a longer heritage. Thus I can walk down slate paved paths to my preindustrial village center for fresh daily fare, community gatherings, the farmer’s market, and drive a short distance through a green belt to my nearby Hyper-U, a metal-clad big box with wood sunscreens, for other groceries, dry goods, and domestic offerings —600 years of time travel in 10 minutes. Choice, a quality in America provided by its cultural melting pot and laissez-faire economics, is counterbalanced in France by aggregated influences over time, a history that seems to serve as an additional buttress against the vagaries of the future. Living here, I have gained an empirical appreciation for how the timeless needs time, how that maturity can form a more stable foundation for the arrival of the “new.” Where America chases the “new,” its shorter history and larger land mass providing a tabula rasa for the future, in France the “new” cannot help but be just another layer of time, its much longer recorded history forming a baseline for merely what comes next. 

Rising high over the vineyards next to the A8 artery, about 12 kilometers from our house, are the beginnings of another “bigger box” distribution center. There are already almost a dozen in the area—the retail typology of the 21st century. Online shopping and deliveries have also become ubiquitous here, as reflected in my neighbor’s initial reply. And if you live in one of these old villages, it’s easier to have your purchases delivered through these narrow winding village streets. Convenience and low prices drive a consumer logic that knows no borders. But with its buffers of green belts and history, France may have enough to find an appropriate balance. The numerous signs illustrating historic sites that dot the A-8 reflect France’s rabid protection of its legacy. This is done to support national identity and the robust tourist economy. Together, these incentives may be enough to form effective safeguards. Time will tell.

All photos by the author.