(FORTUNE Magazine) – They've been challenged in wine making by Californians, overtaken in lingerie by the Chinese, edged out by Iraq in military failure. Now the French risk losing a monopoly even closer to home: building French villages.

This summer a Canadian company put the finishing touches on the first section of Arc 1950 Le Village, a replica alpine town so convincingly French that you could easily think you're in the French Alps--which, come to think of it, you are. The 750-unit settlement, at Les Arcs ski resort, is a creation of Intrawest, a Vancouver company whose repro alpine villages have so far been limited to North America. This is its first attempt to bring Olde Worlde charm to the Old World. "Our focus groups told us people want an authentic Alps experience," says Lorne Bassel, Intrawest's development chief.

Intrawest planned extensively to achieve Le Village's unplanned look. The time-worn masonry, wooden beams, and slate roofs, for instance, all reflect its quirky origins as a dairy farm that gradually grew into a resort. Not that this history is true. "There's a story to our village that we wrote [to guide the architects]," explains Bassel. Still, it's hard to fool a country that invented the word faux. So who's been buying up Le Village's condo units? The less discerning Anglo-Saxon. "The overwhelming majority of our customers are British," says Bassel. --Jeff Wise