French department store group Printemps has embarked on a radical revamp of its iconic Paris flagship as part of plans by its owners to operate a pan-European luxury department chain.

The store on Boulevard Haussmann will benefit from a 150 million (£118 million) overhaul to rival the best department stores in the world, including London’s Selfridges, Neiman Marcus in New York and Tokyo’s Isetan.

Over four years, the art nouveau store’s façade will be restored. Concession shopfits have been upgraded and mass-market labels such as Zara and Mango have been replaced by higher end brands such as Comptoir des Cotonniers. The focus will stay on high fashion brands Missoni, Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen. It has introduced a concierge service, 10 personal shoppers and a Maybach luxury car to transport customers and their shopping to hotels, aiming to cash in on tourist sales.

The project is the brainchild of Maurizio Borletti, chief executive of Borletti Group, which, together with RREEF, a property investment division of Deutsche Bank, bought the 17-store chain in 2006 from retail group PPR for 1.1 billion (£858.8 million).

Borletti also owns Italy’s La Rinascente department store chain and last month was part of a consortium that bought a 49 per cent stake in an investment company that owns most of German department store Karstadt’s parent company, Arcandor.

MHE Retail chairman Edward Whitefield called the Printemps revamp a “winning formula”.

He said the retailer is following the leadership of Selfridges, which blazed a trail in the resurgence of the department store as an empor-ium of brands 20 years ago.

“Department stores like Printemps, Karstadt and La Rinascente got caught in the middle. The mid-market segment was disappearing into corporate mass brands so they had to compete in a different market.”

The evolution towards becoming a “shopping centre for designer brands” will cut Printemps’ costs and increase its exposure on an international level, Whitefield added.

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