Furnishing Your French Property – Where to Go

So you’ve bought your dream property in France, got through all the stress involved in the purchase, completed all the necessary renovations and repairs and can finally relax.

Except you don’t actually have anything to sit on…

Unless you’re bringing all your old furniture overseas with you, the odds are you’re going to need to furnish your new French property. But where are the best places go to get all the things you need?

Flooring

If bare cement doesn’t do it for you, you might want to try Saint Maclou. They have stores right across France and stock a huge range of flooring options as well as blinds/curtains and wallpaper.

Mondial Moquette is similar to Saint Maclou, but focuses pretty much exclusively on flooring. If you can’t make it to one of the forty stores they have scattered across France they also have a handy online ordering system.

Furniture

You’ve crossed land and sea only to release there’s just no escaping IKEA. The Swedish franchise is huge in France, and is a one-stop-shop for all your furnishing needs.

However, if you really want to kick the IKEA habit, Conforama is a great alternative option. It doesn’t have nearly the same kind of range as IKEA but it stocks all kinds of furniture as well as electronics, soft furnishings, small appliances and decorating equipment – and there are multiple stores in pretty much every region of France.

DIY

If you’ve got a house to build, or if you just enjoy a bit of DIY at the weekends, Bricorama is your French Mecca. These mega stores (of which there are 95 in France) will cater for any and all of your DIY needs.

Electronics/Books/Music

If you prefer to buy these kind of items from a shop rather than online, coughAmazoncough, in France there’s only one place to go – FNAC. There’s at least one store in every major French city and with in-store coffee bars and specialist service FNAC goes out of its way to make sure you find shopping with them an experience, rather than a chore.

Everyday Items

In France hypermarkets are one of the best value places to go when you’re looking to buy everyday household goods like crockery, kitchenware and bed linen. Carrefour is a particularly popular chain of hypermarkets. With stores in almost every French town and city they’re easy to access and (unusually for a supermarket) they give priority to locally sourced produce – stocking a wide range of national and regional products.