Yet the town’s history is very recent. Up until the end of the 18th century there were just a few market gardeners, vines, hunting grounds and two large private properties, Villiers and La Planchette, within its territory. In 1822, a land owner named Jean-Jacques Perret divided some 20 hectares (50 acres) into 60 parcels, thus creating the “Champ Perret” (or “Perret field”)… which turned out to be a monumental failure – the parcels were too vast and poorly served. The second attempt made in 1844 by Étienne Noël was more successful. He tasked Nicolas Eugène Levallois, a visionary bistro owner, with designing an autonomous village comprising, in additional to affordable housing, a church, a town hall, schools, a sophisticated sewage system, efficient public lighting, shops and infrastructure for the many entrepreneurs encouraged by the Third Republic. Thus the Village Levallois was born, independent from Clichy and Neuilly, its neighbours, with a modern structure and straight and perpendicular roads which remain to this day its defining feature. It was an overnight success, with companies flocking to the area. In 1866, Village Levallois had 27 laundries, 126 coffee makers and 45 industrial businesses, resulting in the official creation of the commune of Levallois-Perret by Napoleon III on 1 January 1867. In no time at all a certain Gustave Eiffel had set up workshops there that would produce (in kit form!) the famous Tower that bears his name and the Statue of Liberty. A few decades later, Louis Blériot built his factory at the heart of Levallois-Perret to construct the plane he would use to cross the Channel in 1909. Another important date in the commune’s history was the inauguration of its Town Hall in 1898, unanimously considered one of the most beautiful in all the Île de France and an embodiment of the achievement of Nicolas Levallois’ dream in the space of less than 50 years.

An attractive spillover market

Nowadays, Levallois-Perret is a square area with sides of 1.5km (0.93 miles) between the Boulevard Périphérique ring road and the Seine, with the added appendage of the north half of Île de la Jatte, opposite Courbevoie. Home to 70,000 inhabitants, it is densely populated but the successive municipal officials since the ’70s have made it their mission to preserve the town’s quality of life. Notably thanks to ambitious development programmes, both for housing and offices, replacing the former factories along the banks of the Seine. In a town that pampers its families and their children, demand is constant for apartments with 3 to 5 main rooms, whether old, recent or new-builds. The result is constantly rising prices across all neighbourhoods, at between €8,000 and €10,000 per square metre for apartments and up to €13,000 per sq.m for the highly sought-after townhouses. Prices on the upper end of the scale, but lower than in Paris’ 17th arrondissement, just a few minutes away on the other side of the ring road, positioning it as an attractive spillover market for buyers with more or less the same profile, first and foremost executive couples who are previous home owners. Families with an ample budget generally opt for the centre of Levallois for its shops and vibrancy, surrounding the town hall and its 3.5-hectare (8.6-acre) Parc de la Planchette, or the Front de Seine with its particularly inviting recreational facilities in a town with a shortage of green spaces. Levallois has gone to great lengths to make up for this lack of vegetation though since the 2000s, as evidenced by the installation of bee hives on the Île de la Jatte and in Parc Alsace and the planting of clusters of trees in all the town’s districts. 
 

While Levallois-Perret is prized for its modern apartments and proximity to Paris, don’t miss our luxury homes in Boulogne-Billancourt or property investments in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Whether you seek a family home in Saint-Germain-en-Laye or a heritage property in Versailles, the Paris suburbs offer refined opportunities for buying luxury villas or apartments in Saint-Cloud.