In Paris, every building is the same pale stone. But the doors are where the city keeps its colour.
We photographed them. Then went back the next day in different light. Then mapped the streets to find more. Over several days we documented more than forty doors across six arrondissements, and what started as curiosity became something closer to obsession. We were seeing what two hundred years of paint and weather and hands had left behind
We came home with hundreds of photographs and a feeling we could not put down. Somewhere inside those colours was a collection.
Palette des Portes is what followed.
A Parisian door does something very few designed things do. It holds its history on its surface. Every layer of paint is still there — underneath the current one, underneath the one before that, and the one before that. Fifty years of blue. A century of green. The colour you see today is not one coat. It is every coat, compressed into a single surface. A life lived in layers.That is how we think about jewellery. Not as something new you put on. As something that gathers your days, one at a time, until it carries a warmth that did not come from us.
The clasp we use on the necklace is shaped after the iron handles we found on courtyard doors across the 3rd and 4th arrondissements. In Paris, hardware is never hidden. Hinges are exposed. Bolts are decorative. The mechanical is treated as beautiful.
We followed the same principle.
Palette des Portes is our first Atelier collection built entirely from a single place. Every colour, every form, every detail on these pieces can be traced to a specific door, on a specific street, in a specific arrondissement.
We went to Paris and found the colours. We came home and turned them into something you could wear.
Some doors you walk past. Some doors you stop in front of. Some doors you remember long after you have turned the corner.
This collection is for the ones that made us stop.