Architecture + Design

This Tiny Traveling Bookstore Wanders the French Countryside

Its creator—and resident—brings literature to small towns whose booksellers have shuttered
a small building with steps leading up to a door
Photo: Courtesy of La Maison Qui Chemine

Jean-Jacques Megel-Nuber’s first drawing of his imagined bookstore on wheels had little in common with its final design. “It looked like the cabins in a Christmas market," says Megel-Nuber, who is from the Alsace region of eastern France, known for its festive seasonal markets. He had originally thought about opening a brick-and-mortar bookshop but decided he wanted one that could travel to French country towns whose bookstores have often closed. He also wanted a space where he could live during his travels.

The roving bookshop cum home carries some 3,000 volumes, weight around 1,300 pounds.

Photo: Courtesy of La Maison Qui Chemine

Today, the space in which he works and lives has a bright interior with light-colored pine bookshelves and benches. A medal cladding painted a dark blue encircling the bookstore’s entrance adds a modern edge. “He left me carte blanche,” says Pauline Fagué, a recent graduate of interior design school who helped create La Maison Qui Chemine (or "The Wandering House") with her partner, a carpenter. At the time, the couple's firm was so new they did not have a finished prototype, but they took on the project eagerly.

“I wanted a little feeling of a cabin and an aura of a small bookstore, which both evoke a lot of dreaming,” says Fagué of the overall design. A familiar-looking checkout desk is the only curved structure in the space, “giving it an organic feel,” observes Megel-Nuber, noting its contrast to the linear bookshelves.

Custom flaps were installed to roll down over the shelving units and secure the books during transit. Here, a view of the store's seating corner, where patrons are welcome to sit with a book.

Photo: Courtesy of La Maison Qui Chemine

The tiny house also had to be constructed to support a stock of around 3,000 books, weighing some 1,300 pounds. To counter the library's weight, most of the bookshelves line the wall opposite a large metal structure surrounding the entrance.

Still, driving a bookstore through the Jura Mountain range on France’s border with Switzerland is not for the faint of heart. “It’s not complicated going up,” says Megel-Nuber with a laugh of piloting the bookshop, which is larger than a standard mobile home but smaller than a tractor-trailer. “It’s complicated to descend, because the towage is heavier than the truck’s cab.” He takes books down from upper shelves while traveling to lower the vehicle's center of gravity.

Megel-Nuber, seated at the checkout counter, peers up at a cat perched in the lofted sleeping area. The bookstore also contains a fully functional bathroom.

Photo: Courtesy of La Maison Qui Chemine

Towns typically extend an invitation, often during local festivals. Megel-Nuber and his bookshop, officially called Au Vrai Chic Littérère, will spend up to three weeks at a time on the road. Because the owner has asthma, La Maison Qui Chemine used environmentally friendly linseed-oil based paints. A round porthole window lets in air to his lofted bed, which is positioned so close to the ceiling it’s barely noticeable from the floor. Looking back, Megel-Nuber says he visited every other week during the mobile shop's construction. “I needed to see it evolve," he says. “I couldn’t imagine coming to collect it on the last day without it.”