Cultura Brand Guidelines: A 1998 La Rochelle Store, Books & Creative Hobbies Out of Town

A first store on the edge of La Rochelle.

Cultura opened its first store in 1998 at Puilboreau, in the Beaulieu retail zone on the edge of La Rochelle. Livres Hebdo, the French book-trade weekly, reported in September 2015 that the chain was founded by Philippe Van der Wees, a member of the Mulliez family behind the Auchan group, who had begun his retail career at the clothing chain Kiabi. When it arrived, the paper wrote, Cultura looked like an oddity in the book trade and met a degree of scepticism.

The model was set from the start. Cultura put its shops on the outskirts of provincial towns, in the catchment areas of hypermarkets, and mixed cultural leisure with artistic and creative hobbies under a family positioning, Livres Hebdo said, a strategy that the paper judged had worked during a difficult period for France’s large culture stores. On 14 September 2015 the original Puilboreau store moved a few hundred metres into a new building, tripling its floor area to about 3,000 square metres; the chain then had 66 stores and a website.

The company behind the shops is Socultur, which the official French business register lists with its head office at Mérignac, near Bordeaux. Livres Hebdo described Cultura in July 2026 as the chain of the Sodival group; in September 2025 the same paper noted that the Vivlio e-reader sold in Cultura stores belongs to the Phoebux group, which it said also owns Cultura. Arnaud Gauquelin was the chain’s managing director at that time, the paper reported.

Books beside paints, out of town and overseas.

Cultura’s shelves join trades that French retail often keeps apart. From the beginning, Livres Hebdo wrote in 2015, it combined books and music with artistic hobbies, and in the same report Francis Lang, then commercial director of the publisher Hachette Livre, said the chain had grown quickly on illustrated books and was catching up in literature. By September 2025 the paper noted that Cultura, like other large stores, had added a space for second-hand books, at a time when publishers were uneasy about the growth of that market; it also reported that the only e-reader the chain sold was Vivlio.

Growth came mainly from company-run stores in retail parks. Livres Hebdo counted 66 stores in 2015 and 121 at the end of July 2026, when the paper described the chain as strengthening its presence in regions such as Normandy and Brittany while taking a first step into new territories. That July the chain opened three stores, including its first in Vendée, at La Roche-sur-Yon, and a store at Cergy-Pontoise on 29 July that took it to 17 in the Île-de-France region; a store in Chambéry opened on 17 July.

Franchising took the name overseas. On 24 December 2021 ActuaLitté, citing the newspaper France-Antilles, reported that La Librairie Antillaise, a bookseller established in Martinique in 1953 with six shops across Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guyane, would become a Cultura franchise from the first half of 2022 under its owner, Guadeloupe Médiastores; Cultura then listed 91 stores in mainland France. The Guadeloupe shop, at the Destrelland centre in Baie-Mahault, had grown from 1,008 to 1,238 square metres after the departmental commercial planning commission approved the change in August 2021, and a Cultura space had already opened at the Family Plaza centre in Matoury, Guyane. By July 2026, Livres Hebdo listed franchised stores in Martinique, Guadeloupe, Guyane and Corsica, and in mainland France at Sarrebourg, opened at the end of 2024, and Alès, opened in April 2026.

Design and documentation.

French home, culture, organic and city-grocery chains tend to present themselves through the shop before anything else. The store format carries the identity: the edge-of-town retail park with its large single sign, the town-centre supermarket with a narrow shopfront, the neighbourhood grocer on a street corner, or the specialist shop built around loose goods and counters. Many of these companies publish their formats on their own sites, with store counts, opening dates and maps that change from year to year, so any figure in a guide like this one is given with the date of the source.

Print and own label do much of the remaining work. Furniture and home chains publish catalogues and seasonal collections; grocery and organic retailers sell ranges under their own names, with packaging rules that the companies describe in their own words; culture chains organise shelves, workshops and events around books, music and hobbies. Campaigns appear in the French trade press, which usually names the agency, the photographer and the poster network, and those reports are a better record of a brand’s voice than any slogan.

Structure matters as much as style. Several of these names are cooperatives, buying groups or family-controlled holdings rather than single companies: shops may be run by independent members or franchisees under a shared charter, while a central body handles buying, logistics and advertising. Others sit inside larger listed or private groups and have changed hands more than once. Corporate pages on founders and owners, and the official French business register, set out who runs the network and where it is based.

Not every story is one of steady growth. French retail has seen receiverships, rescue plans, sales of store networks and closures, decided by commercial courts and reported with dates. Planning decisions on new stores are taken by departmental and national commissions. Where those events belong to a brand’s history, this series states them plainly, with dates and outcomes.

Retail parks and the planning commissions.

New Cultura stores need the approval of France’s commercial planning commissions, and some projects have met organised opposition from independent booksellers. At Villars, near Saint-Étienne, the town’s mayor announced in October 2024 that a Cultura would open as part of the conversion of a disused 11,000-square-metre retail building, alongside a BlackStore and an Intersport. Sixteen local bookshops campaigned against it, and a petition gathered more than 2,700 signatures. ActuaLitté reported on 9 July 2025 that the Loire departmental commission (CDAC) had split four votes to four, with one abstention, in March 2025, and that the lack of a majority meant the project was refused. On 3 July 2025, after an appeal, the national commission (CNAC) upheld that decision. Livres Hebdo reported in July 2026 that a court dispute between the chain and a group of 14 bookshops and cultural-leisure retailers in Perpignan was still running at that date.

Livres Hebdo has described the same model since 2015: stores on the edge of towns, close to hypermarkets, whose arrival in a new area is followed closely by local booksellers. Livres Hebdo also quoted the manager of the Chambéry store in July 2026 pointing to Albertville, where two long-standing town-centre bookshops were still trading after a Cultura opened nearby.

For a design guide, Cultura shows a culture retailer shaped by the retail park rather than the high street, with books, music and artists’ materials under one name from La Rochelle to the Antilles. Compare Fnac, which began as a buying club in 1954, and Decathlon, another French retail chain. For this guide we use plum, ochre and a teal slate with a display serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Cultura’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.