Fashion Doesn’t Get More Personal Than Drawn-On Clothes

25.07.2024 - 19:58 / nytimes.com

As the Olympics take over Paris, the hospitality scene is expanding in the city — and beyond — with a handful of new hotel openings worth bookmarking for a visit once the crowds have died down. Le Grand Hôtel Cayré opened in the Seventh Arrondissement earlier this month with 123 rooms, all with handcrafted wooden beds and mustard yellow velvet chairs, some with balconies and views of the Sacre Coeur or Eiffel Tower. In Carry-le-Rouet, a seaside village outside of Marseille, L’Hôtel Bleu’s design follows its name with 44 harbor-view rooms decorated in shades of blue. The property’s restaurant offers three seafood-heavy, Mediterranean-inspired tasting menus, while a private cinema room can be reserved when the weather calls for some indoor time. Further east toward Cannes, in the commune of Mougins, Hôtel Le Mas Candille was recently redesigned by the architect and decorator Hugo Toro, whose hand-painted patterns appear on the curtains and carpets in the 46 rooms. Its Glow House spa has four treatment rooms, each with its own terrace, and a private swimming pool overlooking Provence. In Nice’s old town, Hôtel du Couvent opened last month within a 17th-century convent surrounded by two-and-a-half acres of gardens. The former nuns’ herbal shop has been revived and now offers personalized remedies, some made from herbs grown on the property. There’s also a bathing area with pools of varying temperatures inspired by the nearby Roman baths.

The third-generation jewelry designer Camille Beinhorn spent her formative years lingering over gemstones in her mother’s jewelry studios in Singapore and London. After high school, she moved to New York to pursue a degree in painting and sculpture while handmaking jewelry for herself and friends as a hobby. It wasn’t until she attended Arizona’s Tucson Gem Show — an annual trade exhibition where jewelry designers shop for rare gems from thousands of vendors — in 2018 that she decided to create her own brand. To hone her skills, she enrolled in the same jewelry school her grandfather attended in New York City’s diamond district before eventually relocating to Los Angeles. For her debut collection, which was released in 2023, she hand-selected most of the stones herself from artisanal mines and gem trading towns in countries including Sri Lanka and Cambodia. She also drew inspiration from ancient Roman and Byzantine jewelry excavated in Tajikistan to design her one-of-a-kind items, which include a bezel-set ring with an unheated blue sapphire and spinels adorned with white diamond baguettes, and a chain necklace with a two-carat Colombian emerald pendant. All the pieces are crafted in Jaipur at the same workshop where the Indian royal family’s court jewelers are employed.