This interview is excerpted from my book The Paris Flea Market (Prestel, 2024), described the New York Times as “a celebration of the culture, history and oddball treasures of the market”.
Puces Portrait: Jean-Luc Ferrand
A second-generation dealer with a modern mindset, Jean-Luc Ferrand is a committed generalist, moving freely across periods from antiques and objets d’art to contemporary design.
Never wanting to pin himself to one period or speciality, Jean-Luc Ferrand is a generalist in the best sense of the word. At the heart of Marché Biron, his roomy, two-floor stand brings together eighteenth-century furniture, objets d’art and twentieth-century pieces, arranged less like a traditional, shambolic flea-market stand than an elegant showroom. Each room is carefully decorated, with rugs, art and furniture creating the kind of setting that allows clients to picture the pieces in their own homes. Across the Puces, at L’Usine, a much larger stockroom is open for private visits, alongside Ferrand’s workshop, where his full-time cabinetmaker, Fabien Schmidt, carries out restoration work in situ. Ferrand runs the business with a distinctly modern sensibility: an up-to-date website, price tags on every piece, and a practice that moves between antiques and contemporary production, with mirrors, furniture, art and sculpture commissioned from contemporary artisans. The son of an antique dealer, Ferrand grew up in the trade, and now one of his daughters, Victoire, is beginning to work alongside him. Yet for all his familiarity with the Puces, he remains under its spell – fascinated by the sheer improbability of its existence, its constant movement, and its strange, ever-changing mix of people, objects and stories.
