Paris_ The Collected Traveler - Barrie Kerper [266]
Metal Pointu’s Bijoux
Founded in the 1990s in Paris, Metal Pointu’s (“edgy metal”) is a jewelry line created by designer and artist Bernard Bouhnik. I first learned of it when my good friend Lorraine gave me a Metal Pointu’s bracelet for my birthday, and I absolutely flipped over it. With a number of boutiques in Paris (all the locations are on the Web site, metal-pointus.com), it’s easy enough to stop into one and see if the bijoux line is your thing. Bouhnik works in tin, silver, and bronze, and some pieces also include colored beads and crystals; his works are bold and decidedly not overly feminine. Bouhnik’s sister and partner, Sylvie Buchler, has described the collection—which includes neck pieces, earrings, bracelets, cuffs, and rings—as “definitely for a woman who is not shy,” and she explains Bouhnik is inspired by “architecture, urbanism, and engineering.” Some of Bouhnik’s pieces are in museum collections, including the jewelry collection at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. I am also drawn to the packaging: each piece comes in its own fabric sac with the Metal Pointu’s logo stitched onto it, which is slipped into a black deckle-edged box tied at the top with a white ribbon.
I wore the bracelet Lorraine gave me almost every day for three years, until the day the elastic finally gave out. I was crushed, but I figured I would bring it with me on my next trip to Paris and see if it could be repaired. I was so happy to discover soon after that Metal Pointu’s has opened a boutique in New York! I made a beeline to the shop (252 Elizabeth Street/646 454 1539), and Sylvie, who is overseeing the Soho outpost, had the bracelet restrung. I’m wearing it almost every day again.
Le Métropolitain
“Because it is so easy to understand,” Franz Kafka wrote, “the Métro is a frail and hopeful stranger’s best chance to think that he has quickly and correctly, at the first attempt, penetrated the essence of Paris.” Mastering the Métro, which turned one hundred years old in 2000, does give one a sense of truly belonging to Paris. While it may be over a century old, Paris’s system is elegant and (strike days aside) very efficient, and it is in a state of constant renewal. In addition to new tramways ringing the city, the newest line, 14, is one example: the Météor (MÉTro Est-Ouest Rapide), which debuted in 1998, runs from the Gare Saint-Lazare in the eighth to Olympiades in the thirteenth and is completely computer operated. It makes the trip rapidement and tranquillement, and there are no doors between cars, so you can see from car to car, end to end. There are a number of Métro ticket options available to visitors, so be sure to consider them all before you purchase one.
If, like me, you are fond of the original cast-iron Art Nouveau Métropolitain entrances—when I am feeling homesick for Paris, I’m so glad I can walk just a few blocks to MoMA in New York to see the Hector Guimard entrance in the museum’s sculpture garden—and want to learn a little more about this famous subway system, you’ll love these two books: Paris Underground: The Maps, Stations, and Design of the Métro by Mark Ovenden (Penguin, 2009) and Métro Stop Paris: An Underground History of the City of Light by Gregor Dallas (Walker, 2008). Paris Underground is like a love letter to the Métro, with positively everything you’d want to know about the Métro’s graphic history at your fingertips: black-and-white photographs of the original stations, maps, illustrations, reproductions of posters, the creation of the RER lines and the Météor, signage and logos, and a directory of designers. This is the kind of book you can dip into and out of at random, each time discovering some interesting bit of Métro trivia.
Métro Stop Paris is one of my absolute