My World Noor Fares

We explore the life and style of the celebrated jewellery designer at home in London.

- Emily Cronin

Anyone who has had their fill of greige should take a dip into jewellery designer Noor Fares’s world. The eight-bedroom mews house she shares with her husband Alexandre Al Khawam in Belgravia is a walk-in rainbow. “I’m definitely a hoarder,” she laughs, “but I do my best to keep it relatively organised.” It’s difficult to know where to look first: the shelf of crystals, the twinned rustred velvet sofas, the patchwork-wood dining table, the wall of moon prints, the embroidered chairs, the framed Lebanese record sleeves, the... Wait a minute, up there on that stack of books— are those... Could they be... Ginger Spice’s Union Jack platform boots? “They are! I was given them as a birthday gift when I was a teenager,” she says. “My husband just doesn’t understand—he always asks, ‘Why do those have to be on the bookshelf?’”

Fares comes from a prominent Lebanese family in Paris (her father is a former deputy prime minister of Lebanon). “I grew up surrounded by these amazing, eccentric, fun women,” she says—namely Hala, her mother, an artist known for her penchant for wearing mismatched shoes; her creative polymath grandmother and fashion designer aunt Sonia Fares (a former Miss Lebanon). One of Fares’s earliest memories is of making rag dolls from off-cuts of fabric in her aunt’s studio.