La Petite Madelaine

Compagnie de Phalsbourg opened Ma Petite Madelaine on April 27, 2016 south of Tours, a €64 million project designed by architects Nicola and Adélaïde Marchi with wood-clad buildings across a 12-hectare site. About 75 percent of the grounds are landscaped, with 650 trees planted in a deliberate break from the conventional retail-park format of asphalt and box stores.

Roughly 60 percent of the center’s 32 original tenants relocated from the nearby Auchan-anchored Chambray commercial zone, a transfer that drew concern from shopkeepers left behind about losing foot traffic to the new site. Nike Factory Store, Zodio, Intersport, Orchestra and C&A anchor the tenant mix, alongside Truffaut as the garden-retail anchor that took longer to open than the rest of the center.

The center earned a BREEAM Very Good certification during design, and in 2019 added La Ferme de Madelaine, a two-hectare organic educational farm built into the shopping center grounds, the first of its kind in France attached to a retail property. It includes permaculture greenhouses, orchards, vineyards, and chickens and turkeys, running school workshops alongside weekly produce sales inside the center and donations to a local food charity.

Compagnie de Phalsbourg, the same developer behind Waves Actisud in Metz and the Atoll in Angers, positioned Ma Petite Madelaine as part of a consistent architectural strategy: distinctive, landscape-forward retail-park design as a differentiator against conventional big-box commercial zones. The center serves a Tours-Blois-Châtellerault catchment area the developer targeted from the outset.