On a late November morning in central London, on one of the charming cobbled streets that make up Covent Garden’s Seven Dials, Julia Jeuvell is busy at work unveiling the sixth annual Christmas window at her cult stationery store, Choosing Keeping. Jeuvell is a shopkeeper by trade, but a historian by nature—so this year’s window is themed around Marie-Antoinette. “The main protagonist? A spoilt and entitled courtier of the late 18th century French courts,” she tells Vogue. “Beautiful, and rich—and exhausted after an epic shopping spree.” Fine papers from Italy and Japan and candy-colored embroidered ribbons are fashioned into enormous bows, dainty shoes, and billowing dresses. Inside, precious pens, notebooks, custom watercolor sets, and other carefully selected stationery sit on display across glass cases and rickety wooden shelves.
Together with paper artist Beth Scanlon and decorative painter Magda Gordon, Jeuvell’s windows—and her work more broadly—showcase paper and bookbinding techniques for the rich and versatile materials they are. Her singular approach to curating a stationery store offers shoppers the rare opportunity to buy a gift that simply cannot be found anywhere else—a fact most notable in their vast selection of handmade Christmas ornaments.
Seventy-two pages of ornaments feature in the shop’s annual catalog, a newsprint booklet hotly anticipated by customers each year. Delicate ornaments range from an entire category titled “deli counter” (think hand-blown glass butter biscuits to sparkling pickles), to more traditional baubles such as a “snow baby,” made by hand with cotton wadding around wire shapes and adorned with scrap embossed papers. There is a strict criteria when it comes to the ornaments, in terms of their origin, quality, and originality—and, of course, their sense of humor, balancing meticulous craft with the joy and levity of the holidays. “The designs are weird and unexpected,” says Jeuvell. “They are uniquely fine, and weightless, which is, in my opinion, very important to be true to the spirit of what an ornament should be.”
The spirit behind Choosing Keeping originates from Jeuvell’s childhood. Moving between France, Japan, and the United Kingdom, she says, “I never had a good sense of home. Objects were things that, from one house to another, I took along with me. I still have a lot of my desk contents from Japan in perfect order, and my pencil sets are immaculate. I really cared for them; they were more than the objects themselves, they were a little bit of grounding. A sense of continuity.” After a period working in commercial art galleries, she leased a small shop front on Columbia Road, the East London street known for its famous flower market, on a whim in 2012. “I spent a lot of time making museum labels as a gallery assistant,” she notes—so for her first store, she went with white walls and timber floors painted grey, displaying a set of objects she had collected from a 2500 km trip on her bike around Sweden, all labeled with their origin and first year of production. (The items swiftly sold out.)
Equally inspired by stores like New York’s now-closed Kiosk and the specialty haberdashery shops of Paris, she moved the store to Covent Garden in 2018—more easily accessible for her loyal customer base from all over London (and to her surprise, excited people from around the world). On a street that feels tucked away but is only a stone’s throw from one of the busiest shopping roads in London, Choosing Keeping is a destination for those inspired to find souvenirs and gifts that have been sourced for their integrity: beautifully wrapped, and intended to be kept and cherished.
Yet the store is never more enchanting than during the holidays. “Our Christmas spreads and displays are getting bigger, more complex, and require more advance planning than ever before,” Juivell says. “In fact, I already have an idea for next year’s window, and I will probably order my first decorations for next year soon.” (She does admit, however, that her own tree at home is relatively demure compared to the whimsical, tinsel-clad fir in her store.)
Most of all, Juivell is inspired by the idiosyncratic cultural meanings embedded into the objects she sources, creates, and sells—and the thrill of introducing those stories to a new audience. “Antiques are nice, but it’s even better if it’s a living firm that s still working, producing, and participating—preserving your culture for you,” she says. “The objects that you have, they are a part of your culture. People forget that what humans make is an expression of themselves. If you count that link as lost, you fall into consumerism. Nowadays, in a way, it is not what we buy that matters. It’s what we don’t buy that matters.” It’s a timely message given the rampant consumerism the festive season can prompt.
One offering this year speaks to both the year’s theme, and to what makes Choosing Keeping, well, Choosing Keeping? A box made in Italy using Japanese paper, designed to hold a burst of hangable German chocolate ornaments, each wrapped in beautiful foil. Eat the ornaments, keep the box, and the rest will be history.