Bernardo Guillermo

Bernardo Federico Tomás Guillermo (born 17 June 1977, Utrecht, Netherlands) is a furniture designer and a more distant member of the Dutch Royal Family. He is a first cousin of King Willem-Alexander and Carlos, Duke of Parma.

Life and career

Guillermo was born in Utrecht, the Netherlands, as the eldest child and son of Princess Christina and Havana-born Cuban exile Jorge Pérez y Guillermo. His mother was the youngest child of Queen Juliana and of Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld. He has one younger brother Nicolás Guillermo (born 1979) and one younger sister Juliana Guillermo (born 1981). Guillermo and his siblings did not receive any royal title because his mother Princess Christina, at that time ninth in line for the Dutch throne, renounced her, and her children's, rights to the throne before converting to Catholicism and marrying a commoner, his father, in 1975. His paternal uncle is the American Professor of Film Studies Gilberto Pérez y Guillermo.

Guillermo was born and raised in Wassenaar, near The Hague, the Netherlands. He moved to New York City in 1994 and has been living in there since. In 1996, he attended Sarah Lawrence College where he studied philosophy and art history. Subsequently Guillermo studied industrial design at the prestigious Pratt Institute from 2002 to 2005.

His work was selected for exhibition at Brooklyn Designs in 2005, and at the 2008 DWR Modern-Design-Function exhibit in New York. His work has been published in the May 2005 issue of the magazine Wallpaper where he has been described as one of 10 Most Wanted Designers, and in the December 2005 issue of ArtReview.

Bernardo Guillermo's design studio is based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard area where he and his friends work as a freelancer for the City of New York.

Marriage and children

On 2 March 2009 in a civil ceremony in New York City, he married Eva Marie Valdez, an editor, who has worked for several New York publishing houses, including Rizzoli. She had previously been married to Andrew Michael Prinz. [1] Their religious wedding ceremony took place on 5 September 2009 at the Queen of All Saints Church in Brooklyn, at which many members of Dutch Royal Family were present. Together they have two children: a girl, Isabel Christina Guillermo (born 13 April 2009), and a boy, Julián Jorge Guillermo (born 21 September 2011).

In April 2013 Valdez was controversially named as responsible for the break-up of the marriage of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of the New York experimental rock band Sonic Youth.[2] In the article it was claimed that Valdez was in open relationship with Guillermo, although that is denied by those who know the couple and the article failed to cite its own sources.

Ancestry

References

  1. ↑ Bernardo Guillermo marries - webblog Royal Musings
  2. ↑ Jezebel