We came to Paris as a family of four, the way you're supposed to — with a loose plan and comfortable shoes and the understanding that the kids would remember different things than you would.
My children wanted the Eiffel Tower, the crêpes, the locks on the bridges. My husband wanted the food. I wanted Notre-Dame.
We'd spent the first part of the trip on a bike trip through Provence — that's how my family travels. We don't do poolside vacations. We ride, we walk, we cover as much ground as our legs will allow. The Provence leg had been all lavender fields and hilltop villages and long, sun-soaked descents into river valleys. Paris was supposed to be the rest stop. The city days after the countryside.
I knew what I was walking into. The fire of April 2019 had devastated the cathedral's roof and toppled its spire, and by the time our family of four arrived, the reconstruction was well underway. Scaffolding wrapped the exterior. Cranes rose above the Île de la Cité like mechanical sentries. The cathedral that had stood for over eight hundred years was, for the first time in most people's memory, a construction site.
Most of the tourists on the surrounding streets looked disappointed. They took photos of the scaffolding the way you'd photograph a bandage — dutifully, a little sadly, proof they'd been there while the patient was recovering.
I saw something completely different.
The Beauty of Being Unfinished
There's a thing that happens when you strip a building back. You see its bones. The structure that holds everything else up — the flying buttresses, the stone ribs, the engineering that medieval builders calculated by instinct and geometry — all of it becomes visible in a way it never is when the building is whole.
Notre-Dame in scaffolding was a lesson in what architecture actually is. Not decoration. Structure. The cathedral's beauty wasn't something applied to a surface. It was built into the skeleton.
I've thought about this a lot as a jewelry designer. The pieces I love most are the ones where the structure is the beauty — where there's nothing decorative hiding the engineering. A rose window works this way. The tracery isn't ornament laid over glass. The tracery is what holds the glass in place. Remove it and the whole thing collapses. Every line is doing two jobs at once: holding and being beautiful.
That's what I want my jewelry to do.
The Rose Window
Notre-Dame's rose windows are among the most famous in the world, and for good reason. The north and south transept windows each span roughly thirteen meters — enormous circles of stone and glass that have been filtering Parisian light since the thirteenth century.
What strikes a jeweler isn't the scale. It's the precision. Each section of tracery radiates from the center with a geometric confidence that feels almost mathematical — because it is. Medieval craftsmen understood proportion the way musicians understand harmony: as something you feel in your body before you prove it on paper.
Standing on the Île de la Cité, looking up at that geometry through the scaffolding, I felt the same gut recognition I'd felt years earlier in Sicily, standing in front of a different rose window on a different island. That feeling of: I need to make this. I need to translate this into something someone can wear.
The Paris pendant came from that moment. It's approximately 28mm — the entire cathedral rose window compressed into something you can hold between your fingers. Diamonds at the center, the outer ring, and the bail echo the way light moves through the original: from the core outward, catching and releasing as it goes.
What the Scaffolding Taught Me
I think about Notre-Dame's reconstruction more than I expected to. The cathedral reopened in December 2024 to enormous crowds and global celebration, and the photographs of the restored interior are stunning. But I'm glad I saw it the other way — mid-process, exposed, still becoming.
There's a parallel to how I work. I photograph architectural details on location, but I don't design in the moment. I bring images home to my studio in Charlotte and let weeks pass before I start sketching. That distance matters. The first impression fades, and what survives — the proportions, the geometry, the essential structure — is what ends up in metal.
Notre-Dame taught me that the in-between state has its own beauty. The moment when something is clearly not finished but just as clearly not broken. When the scaffolding comes down, you forget it was ever there. But the building remembers. The stone remembers being touched by new hands, being reinforced, being cared for.
The best jewelry has this quality too. A piece with history doesn't look damaged. It looks loved.
Paris Through a Jeweler's Eye
Notre-Dame gets all the attention, but Paris is full of architectural details that reward a closer look. Once you train your eye to see structure instead of surface, the city opens up.
The Haussmann balconies along the grands boulevards aren't just decorative. Each ironwork railing was hand-forged, and if you look closely, you'll notice the patterns vary by floor — a system that dates to the 1860s and originally indicated the social standing of the residents.
The Pont Alexandre III is usually photographed for its gilded statues, but the real artistry is in the Art Nouveau lampposts — the organic curves of the metalwork, the way the designers made iron look like it was growing rather than forged.
The passages couverts — the covered arcades of the 2nd and 9th arrondissements — are where Paris hides its most intricate glasswork and mosaic floors. Galerie Vivienne and Passage des Panoramas are the best known, but nearly a dozen survive, each with tile patterns and ironwork worth an hour of slow looking.
Sainte-Chapelle, just steps from Notre-Dame on the Île de la Cité, has stained glass windows that make the cathedral's look restrained. On a sunny morning, the upper chapel becomes a box of colored light. If Notre-Dame's rose windows are symphonies, Sainte-Chapelle is the entire orchestra playing at once.
If You Go
Notre-Dame de Paris reopened in December 2024 and free timed reservations are now available through the cathedral's official website and app. Book in advance — demand is extraordinary. The exterior is best appreciated from the Left Bank quays or from Square Jean XXIII behind the cathedral.
Best for architecture lovers: Start at Sainte-Chapelle in the morning (the light is best before noon), walk to Notre-Dame, then cross to the Left Bank and wander the Rue du Bac and Boulevard Saint-Germain for some of the city's finest Haussmann facades. End the afternoon in the passages couverts of the 2nd arrondissement.
Don't miss: The Musée Carnavalet (free admission) tells the history of Paris through its architecture and decorative arts. The ironwork collection alone is worth the visit.
The Paris Collection is available at kirstendexter.com in 14K gold, vermeil, and oxidized sterling with diamond accents.