Crystal chandeliers: perspectives on the return of Parisian radiance… crystal fragments light into rainbows, something few materials can do ...
In a recent piece from The New York Times International Edition, the designer Harry Nuriev imagined something unsettling: a world without crystal as he talks about a new exhibition in Paris. Around the same time, Financial Times HTSI noted the unexpected return of chandeliers reappearing in contemporary interiors with magnificent confidence. For me, crystal has never been theoretical, nor decorative, in the purely aesthetic sense. It has always been personal and more than a trend. Crystal is making a comeback. In Paris, crystal has found new meaning. Designers are talking more about presence: a single chandelier rather than a roomful of glitter. Nuriev’s collaboration with Baccarat is about stripping away assumptions of the Palace of Versailles and its hall of crystal chandeliers and asking what crystal can mean for the everyday home in modern times. Crystal is also becoming rare. True crystal, especially hand-cut, requires time, skill, and patience to create, and many historic ateliers have closed or reduced production due to the rise of modern manufacturing. Artisanship is no longer passed down as it once was. Crystal did not disappear; it became unfashionable. Minimalistic decor stripped interiors of ornament: the crystal chandelier is too ornate, too reminiscent of another era, they say. But now, crystal returns, not as excess, classy glassy, or luxury. Its elegance is restrained. Yet it continues to do what it always has done. Crystal responds to light and movement. It does something few materials can: it holds light and fragments it into rainbows. A small rainbow prism on a windowsill can transform an ordinary morning into something briefly extraordinary. My relationship with crystal began long before I understood any of this. It began with my mother, Christel. She is gone now, but crystal remains one of the ways I continue to encounter her as a living presence in light. I do not imagine a world without them because I have built a small world of crystals around me. They sit on windowsills, on tables, clustered in bowls or as a singular piece. When the sun enters the apartment, the crystals cast fragments of rainbow hues across walls, books, and my computer. These moments are fleeting but beautiful. I keep crystals around me because they do something words cannot fully do. They make memories visible. They allow me to experience my mother not only in recollection, but in shifting moments of light and colour. There is comfort in that. To imagine a world without crystal is, perhaps, to imagine a world without reflection. For designers, crystal may be returning as material. For me, it never left. It is Paris, the City of Light. It is my mother, still finding ways to enter the room.
Can’t see the whole article? Want to view the original article? Want to view more articles? Go to Martina’s Substack: The Stories in You and Me More Paris articles are in my Paris website The Paris Residences of James Joyce You're currently a free subscriber to The Stories in You and Me . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
|
Friday, 3 April 2026
Crystal chandeliers: perspectives on the return of Parisian radiance
Saturday, 28 March 2026
A haiku poem, a memory of long ago …
There are some poems that feel as though they have been waiting for me for a long time. I found one in the 2007 Haiku poetry collection A Voyage of My Mind … by Istanbul-born Fureya Ersoy, now living in London. It is a nameless haiku poem, so delicate it almost dissolved as I read it: “raindrops on roses flamboyant pearls of nature— till the sun comes out” There is something simply miraculous about haiku, like the way it distills a moment so precisely that time seems to hesitate. Three unrhymed lines, 17 syllables, and yet it is an entire world: the cool weight of raindrops, the soft yielding of petals, the shimmer of something that will not last. I was no longer reading. I was remembering. The phrase “raindrops on roses” carries its own memory, doesn’t it? It’s a gentle thread back to the 1965 movie The Sound of Music, and to Julie Andrews singing with that crystalline clarity that defined so much of my childhood. The song, My Favorite Things, was a catalogue of comfort, a list of a few of the singer’s pet likes, such as raindrops on roses and schnitzel with noodles. But here, in Ersoy’s haiku, the raindrops are no longer simply comforting. They are “flamboyant pearls of nature” and extravagant, almost excessive in their beauty. There is something sensual in that phrase, something tactile. You can feel the roundness of the droplets, see the way they cling to the petal, trembling to the rose before surrendering to gravity or light. And then, the line “till the sun comes out.” Everything is temporary. That is the truth at the heart of the poem. The pearls will vanish. The roses will dry. The moment dissolves even as we witness it. Perhaps that is why it lingers with me. Because I have always been drawn to the fleeting, the half-seen, the spaces between presence and absence, this haiku feels like standing at a window just after rain, when the world is both sharpened and softened, when light begins to return but hasn’t yet claimed everything. Again, it is a memory of being in Aunt Jeanne’s cottage garden in Normandy, France, after a brief shower of rain on her roses. It is a poem that asks nothing of you except to notice. But noticing the ordinary, it becomes luminous. The familiar becomes strange again. Even a childhood melody returns, altered, and less about comfort now, and more about impermanence. A poem about how beauty intensifies precisely because it cannot stay. I think that is why this poem feels like it belongs to me, in some unspoken way. It holds the exact tension I recognize in my own life; the desire to preserve moments, and the understanding that they are most alive because they slip through our fingers. “raindrops on roses” … Not forever then Though just long enough but surely forever now
Can’t see the whole article? Want to view the original article? Want to view more articles? Go to Martina’s Substack: The Stories in You and Me More Paris articles are in my Paris website The Paris Residences of James Joyce Invite your friends and earn rewardsIf you enjoy The Stories in You and Me , share it with your friends and earn rewards when they subscribe.
|
Crystal chandeliers: perspectives on the return of Parisian radiance
… crystal fragments light into rainbows, something few materials can do ... ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏...
-
thealchemistspottery posted: " "I shall pass through this world but once.If therefore, there be any kindness I can sho...
-
Stimulate the body to calm the mind Cross Fit for the Mind The Newsletter that Changes the Minds of High Performers If overstimulation is th...
-
petrini1 posted: " For Week 7, the theme of genealogist Amy Johnson Crow...
