A trip to The Village, Le French Outlet

Most Americans are familiar with outlet malls.  The typical American outlet mall is a strip-mall with a large parking lot.  Here are a couple of examples:

North Bend Outlet Mall

Centralia Outlet Mall

A few are more attractive and inviting:

Tulalip Outlet mall

Well, we recently went to The Village, Le French Outlet, not far from Lyon.  

Anna welcoming you to this tour of The Village

It has over 2,000 parking spots, over 75 stores, and ~10 restaurants of various kinds.  Here’s a map to give you an idea of the layout:

Sorry this is so hard to read, but it will give you and idea of the layout.

Not only is it huge, but it’s pleasant and attractive.  It’s nice to just wander around, check out shops, and enjoy the scenic water features, plantings, etc.  And, then, of course decide which restaurant to go to and whether you want to eat inside or outside…maybe a nice table near the water?  

This picture was taken last June.

You can see how popular this place is!

Showing the walkway and a few of the shops

All of this sounds very adult, but the also have a very nice children’s play area complete with “big toy” and ground-level trampoline.    Here’s their description, “Because your kids are not (yet) fans of shopping, we have planned for them in the KIDS area: a restaurant, games, books and a nanny who will occupy them while you walk freely from shop to shop.”  How very civilized!

Look carefully in the middle and you'll see part of the play area.

So, what did we do there?  Well, Anna had been to The Village last summer with our French daughter, Estelle, and Chantal, Estelle’s real mom.  So, she had an idea of what it was all about, but this was David’s first time there.  The first thing we did was to mark our parking spot on a map and note which entrance we used!  

An entrance

Then we wandered around looking at shops and enjoying the scenery.  After taking a tour of the entire place, we returned to a shop where Anna had seen something she liked in the window.  The shop is Garcia Jeans, an Italian clothing company.  As the name suggests, their specialty is jeans and casual wear, but Anna ended up getting the dress she had seen in the window, a lovely wrap-around black and white print dress for 48.99€ (a steal!).  And, while she was trying on the dress, David found a very nice short-sleeved cotton print shirt for 34.99€ (also a good deal!). 

It was too early to think of dinner so we stopped in at Starbucks (yes, they are everywhere!) for lattes while we discussed our dinner options. We decided to go with a fairly light dinner and made our way to La Crépe au Carré for an early dinner.  Great service, good food, and very reasonably priced.  Just what we wanted!

Our restaurant is on the right in this picture.

We wandered around a bit more and then made our way back to “our” entrance and parking lot.  

More shops

If you like, you can find out more about The Village at thevillageoutlet.com.

 Our next stop was a very special show which you will be reading about soon.