GEM IDEAS

Marco Panconesi has filled his Paris apartment with precious stones and trinkets he’s collected on his travels, and that inspire his own otherworldly creations.

- Kin Woo

WHEN THE JEWELLERY DESIGNER Marco Panconesi was growing up in Italy in the 1990s, he spent his summers traveling through Europe with his family in a customised ’80s-era caravan built by his grandfather. “It was always an adventure full of discovery,” he recalls. “I loved seeing all the temples and ruins and opening myself to see beauty in different places, histories and crafts.”

This appreciation for disparate cultures and eras has stayed with him and is now evident in the 700-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment in Paris’s Third Arrondissement that Panconesi, 31, shares with his boyfriend, the British choreographer Jordan Robson, 26. Panconesi moved into the space, located on the third floor of a stately Haussmannian building, two years ago, taking over the lease from a former colleague at Balenciaga, where he worked as an accessories designer from 2014 to 2018. Since then, Panconesi has slowly filled his and Robson’s home — treating its white walls and herringbone wood floors as a blank canvas — with an idiosyncratic array of objects that inspire his work as a jewellery designer for brands including Fendi, Peter Pilotto and Fenty, and for his own namesake line, which he founded last year. He takes a magpie approach to decorating, he says, because “I like my home to feel like a projection of my brain.”