a jeweller’s house in Normandy is a gem, too

Gabrielle Greiss’s fascination with animals has yielded a debut jewellery collection that radiates talismanic power. A crow with a yellow jasper stone dripping from its beak looms from a cuff collar over a gambolling fox; a trio of monkeys, one with a crown, hangs from a tangle of chains. Each of the 18 limited-edition sets has been inspired by one of Jean de La Fontaine’s fables, sculpted by Greiss in wax, then cast in Paris by a craftsman in gold- and silver-plated bronze. “For me, they’re like friends I can carry around my neck,” she explains. 

The beguiling effect is only heightened by the backdrop of Greiss’s 18th-century farmhouse. Hidden behind a Romanesque church in a village of half-timbered houses once populated by clog-makers in stormy-skied Normandy, the two-storey longère is set in a garden teeming with roses and wild sweet peas. Greiss herself is dainty as a sprite, with a shock of auburn hair and watchful china-blue eyes. 

Born in Munich, educated at Central Saint Martins in London, and with a fashion design career spanning positions at Martine Sitbon, Sonia Rykiel and Chloé in Paris, she has been a largely backstage figure on the fashion scene since the ’90s. But her foray into jewellery – sparked by painting and sculpture classes at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, followed by a jewellery course after she left Chloé in 2022 – has placed the designer centre stage.

“I didn’t want to do something that didn’t have a meaning behind it,” she says, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her living room, wearing a man’s striped smock and vintage sunflower-yellow trousers, an old prototype of a Chloé pendant around her neck. “I thought: I don’t want to do sweet animals to hang around the neck. Then it came to me, to illustrate the fables.”  

Her 14-year-old tabby cat, Fur Coat, proved a willing model for Le Chat et le Rat, the fable in which a wily cat plays dead, hanging from a rope to fool the rodents. She enlisted her American friend Thomas Engelhart, a sometime designer for Hermès, to create theatrical boxes for each set. Handmade in fruitwood in Engelhart’s New York living room and covered with handpainted paper in faux marble or porphyry, the Wunderkammern display the jewellery suspended from miniature ceramic trees or classical columns Greiss makes in her kiln. “It’s a pity to put jewellery in the cupboard when you don’t wear it,” she says. “I thought it would be nice to hang them on the wall.”

Greiss’s home is itself a sort of life-sized Wunderkammer, blending brocante finds with artworks of her own. As she sets a homemade tomato tart on the table one June lunchtime, it’s clear the farmhouse functions both as a locus for experimentation and as a retreat from the fashion industry’s churn. She purchased the rundown property with her English partner Michael Cleary, a film director, in 2010 as a weekend retreat from their apartment in Paris’s 11th arrondissement. Back then it comprised several poky rooms and a hayloft, with wildly overgrown grounds slowly being colonised by Thuja conifers. Together they tamed the garden, adding a vegetable patch, a lily pad-adorned pond, and a cabin with a wood-fired sauna and views over the ancient woodland that designates this region of Le Perche as one of France’s most picturesque. 

The hayloft, meanwhile, has been converted into a soaring wood-beamed bedroom, office and living area. A reclaimed oak floor was laid by hand by Cleary, and a delicate ironwork staircase from Emery & Cie juxtaposed with a burgeoning collection of taxidermy. Downstairs, the kitchen has been reconfigured into a bright, open‑plan scheme; its floor laid with reclaimed terracotta tomettes, its walls crowded with mismatched wooden-framed mirrors, its windows hung with antique Indian textiles repurposed into curtains by Greiss. 

If Cleary tends towards the practical, Greiss has a weakness for whimsy. “Most things I buy [Michael doesn’t] like in the beginning,” she laughs. 

“I am more critical in terms of asking, do we need that?” Cleary concedes. “I upset Gabrielle quite a lot as I’m like, where is that going to live?” 

She’s particularly fond of a doll’s house unearthed at a Paris flea market that she painted white and filled with ceramic dolls by her friend the French artist Sylvie Auvray: it is displayed alongside military band miniatures with matchsticks for drumsticks. The mostly second-hand sofas are loaded up with patchwork cushions; the walls are hung with framed life drawings from her Beaux-Arts classes. Even the couple’s habitual twilight walks are put to use: pressed flowers Greiss has foraged and spray painted, inspired by the artist Georgie Hopton, sit in frames around the doors. 

Each piece in the couple’s home prompts an anecdote. In one corner of the sitting room, three crudely carved Fijian statues purchased at an antiques store in the nearby village of Bellême congregate, some with ceramic appendages that Greiss made in her kiln. “I thought they should have new arms so they could hug,” she says. In another an indigo-blue, ceramic-tiled coffee table features Greiss’s own folk-style design of animals mounted on a wooden frame made by Cleary. “When I designed a [fashion] collection, I liked to imagine a film, or a situation, rather than just doing clothes that you put together. I’m used to having a story,” says Greiss.

She attributes her creativity, and her love of “nature, animals, stories, tales”, to her German grandmothers. Both made their own clothes and decorated their own homes. She enjoyed a “Heidi-like existence” spending childhood weekends with her maternal grandmother in the mountains at Chiemsee, some 45 minutes from Munich, drawing and painting. These memories influenced her jewellery designs, which are sold as a full fable in editions of five (from €4,000). Rather than purchase one ring, say, one acquires La Lièvre et la Tortue, a set comprising a necklace with a weighty hare-shaped pendant, a cuff bearing a tortoise and a ring mounted by a snail. First editions come with a wunderkammer; when they were first unveiled at Pierre Marie’s gallery in Paris in March, the American art collector and philanthropist Beth Rudin DeWoody snapped up two. For now, Greiss conceives of the jewellery as collectors’ items rather than a commercial venture; pieces are being sold by Marie and at Karry Gallery in Paris, and at Mameg in Los Angeles. 

Marc Ascoli, the influential art director who spotted Greiss as an MA student at Central Saint Martins and brought her to Paris to work with Martine Sitbon, was particularly happy to observe this professional shift in gear. “Immediately when I met Gabrielle, I saw this resemblance to Martine – this side that was mysterious, soft, delicate, and then this side that was rebelling against the status quo, with a desire to experiment and express herself,” he recalls. “When she returned to the Beaux Arts, it unveiled her artistic soul once again.” 

Greiss agrees. “I worked with Alber [Elbaz] – those people breathe fashion. Now you just get somebody fluttering around saying yes or no to things. I had thought for a long time, I would like to do something more personal and try something different,” she says of her pivot. Patti Smith’s autobiography Just Kids, which she filched from Cleary on a holiday, and has since read several times, provided the final spur. “I like when [Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe] bought one sheet of paper and drew… and they made those necklaces out of anything they found. I liked the spontaneity of making jewellery,” she says.

Whether in Paris or Le Perche, Greiss and Cleary rarely venture anywhere without popping into a reclamation yard or an antiques shop. The cast iron radiators with ornate patterns were amassed over a series of weekends sifting through a local château clearance sale, then sandblasted by Cleary. The bedroom fireplace, which houses books in its nook instead of logs, was wrestled into a tiny Renault Twingo rental car while on holiday in the south of France. Even the wall hanging behind the bed was an auspicious purchase: the couple were haggling over it at the Clignancourt flea market in Paris, struck by its likeness to the Normandy garden, when they received the call from the vendor informing them their bid on the house had been successful.      

The interiors change periodically when Cleary instigates a purge. Greiss is fine with this. “It’s sad if your whole life you live with the same thing.” She plans to spend the summer tinkering away in her glass-walled atelier at the back of the house, as well as harvesting apples from the orchard for the apple juice they bottle locally every year. She envisions adding more jewellery fables to the current line-up of 18 (there are more than 200 to choose from), but is equally energised by ceramic projects. Next on the list is a tiled relief for a Bavarian-style stove. “I’m kind of fantasising about some crazy piece,” she smiles.