Inside the Sparkling Paris Home of Jewelry Designer Aurélie Bidermann
Three weeks before French president Emmanuel Macron ordered COVID-19 confinement in 2020, French jewelry designer Aurélie Bidermann moved into an 18th-century flat on the Left Bank with her young daughter. Having all those months at home gave Bidermann time to meditate on the 3,200-square-foot south-facing space—to understand the light, the flow, and the energy. Confinement, she said, “allowed me to do the apartment as I wanted.”
And what she wanted—most especially during such a trying time—was something full of delight, like her work. For more than 20 years, Bidermann has designed jewelry that is witty and whimsical; during a recent visit, she showed some favorite pieces, including pomegranate earrings decorated with tiny rubies and pale pink diamonds, clover earrings with soft pink sapphires, and scarab earrings with vibrant green tsavorite garnets. Her clients have included Gwyneth Paltrow, Sofia Coppola, and Beyoncé, and she has created runway commissions for the likes of New York fashion designer Jason Wu.
Now Bidermann is moving into tableware. For the French style platform Holiday Paris, she has decorated Paul Arnhold glassware with small splashes of pink, like cherry blossom petals. And for the French decor start-up Waww La Table, she has designed linens hand-embroidered with her signature insouciant motifs, such as apple-laden trees, golden wheat with buzzing bumblebees, and clovers with ladybugs.
Parisian by birth and a member of an eminent French fashion family—her grandfather and uncle manufactured menswear for, among others, Yves Saint Laurent, Courrèges, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren—Bidermann grew up across the Seine, in the posh 16th arrondissement. The Bidermann seat was filled with Art Nouveau and Art Deco furniture and Symbolist paintings. Her parents were “great collectors,” she said, who spent hours scouring galleries, auctions, and the Paris flea markets. “On weekends, we’d be at the flea market by 8 a.m., when vendors were still unloading the trucks and station wagons, to see what they had,” she recalled. On Sunday afternoons, the Bidermanns opened their home to friends—“mostly gallerists and dealers,” she said. “I bathed in this milieu.”
Bidermann studied art history in London and Paris, and worked for Sotheby’s in New York and Paris. “I saw marvels come and go,” she said. She went back to school, to study gemology in Anvers and jewelry design at the prestigious Haute École de Joaillerie in Paris. In the early 2000s, she traveled to Jaipur, where, with the encouragement of fellow French jewelry designer Marie-Héléne de Taillac, Bidermann created her first collection, at the Gem Palace. She quickly made a name for herself, with two boutiques in Paris and, for a time, two in New York City. In 2015, she sold a minority stake to private investors; she has since stepped away from the brand after it was wholly acquired.
