Seventy-one pieces, chosen one at a time by eye and gathered into four houses under one roof — estate fine jewelry, estate costume, designer and couture, and Native American and artisan silver. Each piece is vintage or estate; none is new.
Solid gold, diamonds, and fine pearls — signed, precious, and estate-fresh.
This is fine jewelry at its height — no qualifier, no category to grade it on a curve. From Utopia of Milano, a house that shows alongside the great names at the world’s high-jewelry salons, comes a bracelet handmade ...
Ming’s of Honolulu was the great Hawaiian jeweler — founded in 1940, beloved for pairing carved jade with gold in a style all its own — and this bangle is one of its most coveted forms. A single band of translucent, m...
A single great pearl, and the papers to prove it. This ring from Ming’s of Honolulu centers a magnificent 14mm Tahitian South Sea pearl — the large, naturally dark, iridescent pearl that takes years to grow and comman...
Fifty diamonds, and not one of them idle. Le Vian built its name on stones and on the confidence to set a great many at once, and this 18K solid white-gold ring is the argument for both: twenty-two natural baguettes r...
An engagement ring is a promise you wear, and this one keeps it in the details. James Allen set a .61-carat round brilliant at its center — VS2 clarity, F color, the near-colorless, eye-clean grade you’d choose if som...
Rose gold was made for rubies, and Effy knew it. From the house’s Ruby Royale line comes this cocktail ring in 14K solid rose gold — a warm, blushing metal that makes red stones read deeper — swirled through with 3.52...
Thirty-three and a half carats of golden citrine, caged in solid 18K gold. This one-of-a-kind pendant is the work of Orlanda Olsen, a Manhattan couture designer, built around a single faceted pear-cut citrine — 33.58 ...
Ming’s built its name on flowers, and this cluster ring is the house in miniature. In 14K yellow gold, it gathers translucent jade — a pale green that turns toward bluish-grey as the light moves — with lustrous cultur...
Three Australian crystal opals, floating on a platform of gold. This modernist statement ring is the work of the designer-artisan Ronay, built in 14K solid yellow gold, and its whole idea is architectural: three raise...
The great signed houses — Trifari, Napier, and their peers — vintage and collected, never new.
From the Ming collection, Trifari's "tribute to elegant Chinese inspiration" as Women's Wear Daily described it, comes Alfred Philippe's Big Ming Bat of 1942: gold-plated, enameled, and large enough to be the only thi...
Trifari made jewelry at every level for the American market, but the great pieces came in limited runs, sent to the large department stores around the holidays and sold to their best customers, often by invitation. Th...
Ten gold-plated panels, each set with pavé crystal rhinestones, imported swirled emerald-green glass cabochons, and finished with red and blue teardrop rhinestones. This is the 1960s Moghul Jewels of India collection ...
The invisibly set pieces are the most prized Trifari of all, and the reason is in the making: the waffle-cut glass is held from behind so that no metal interrupts the surface, a technique modelled on the invisible set...
Four panels, and every one of them a small scene. The first, a large domed dragon's breath glass stone. The second, the genie in his turban with another dragon's breath at its centre, bending over a Lucite crystal bal...
Alfred Philippe designed the jewels for Trifari's Schéhérazade collection in 1949, and then he designed the thing a woman would carry alongside them. This is that compact: a framed panel of Moghul jeweling set into th...
Trifari's fruit salad pieces are close to extinct, and for two plain reasons: very few were ever made, because the molded glass Trifari imported from France was expensive, and almost nobody who owns one wants to sell....
Trifari's special pieces came out once a year, at Christmas, in very limited numbers and only to a handful of stores: Macy's flagship at Herald Square, Marshall Field's on State Street, where they were shown to the mo...
A Maltese cross in gold plate, built around flawed emerald-green Gripoix-style glass cabochons and ringed with ruby red and sapphire blue — the Jewels of India collection at its most dimensional. The collection this p...
Studio and couture names — from Paris, poured glass to hand-carved cameo.
Ten small worlds, each one lifted from the hilt of a samurai sword. These are menuki — the ornaments a swordsman’s palm once closed around — worked in shakudō, the old Japanese alloy of silver, copper, and gold that a...
Erté spent forty years turning the alphabet into women. Beginning in the 1920s, the great Art Deco master drew each of the twenty-six letters as a human form; late in life those drawings became jewels, cast in gold an...
You feel this one before you see it clearly: 235 grams of solid sterling silver, a cuff with real heft, coiled into a serpent that wraps the wrist. Matthew Campbell Laurenza works like a jeweler and a sculptor at once...
Isabel Canovas was Paris couture’s best-kept secret — a designer whose accessories the fashion houses coveted and collectors now chase relentlessly. This 1980s bracelet is her masterpiece in miniature: three strands o...
From the rarefied world of Parisian haute couture, a set that looks like modern sculpture and wears like jewelry. Jacques An-Lanh is a name known to serious couture-jewelry collectors and almost no one else — a celebr...
Stephen Dweck signed his one-of-a-kind pieces with a beetle named Adam, and finding Adam on a clasp is how collectors know they’re holding the real, singular thing. This 2015 bracelet is one of those OOAK creations: n...
Jean Paul Gaultier's ‘Reverse' collection for Atelier Swarovski, Autumn/Winter 2016 — a homage to contradiction, built on asymmetry and on pieces the wearer can turn and switch according to mood. This is the opulent l...
Dior licensed its designs to American houses in the postwar years, and Kramer of New York made some of the best of them. This sunburst set is one: a silver-tone Deco frame carrying Gripoix-style jade glass cabochons, ...
When a jeweler’s work lives in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you’re no longer buying jewelry — you’re buying art you can wear. Patricia Von Musulin is that jeweler, and this one-of-a-kind sterling silver piece is a ...
Navajo and studio silversmiths — one hand, one piece.
A torque is the oldest form a necklace takes — a single curved band that opens at the throat — and Navajo hands have been raising it in silver for generations. This one-of-a-kind set earns its name: “Kaleidoscope,” fo...
Karl Lee worked at Nepenthe in Big Sur and helped define, over a generation, what West Coast design looked like: minimalist, superbly made, and built around materials he found himself. This ring is that practice in mi...
Cobblestone inlay is Navajo silversmithing at its most demanding: dozens of stones, cut to irregular shapes and fitted together like a paved street, no two the same, every edge flush. This cuff is the work of the Nava...
Great artisans earn the right to be playful, and Andrea Kennington uses it. Her work rarely comes to market, and this one-of-a-kind brooch-pendant shows why collectors chase it: a whimsical composition in sterling sil...
Forty-nine grams of sterling, paved edge to edge in stone. This cobblestone cuff comes from the Navajo artisan who signs simply “CR,” and it’s a masterclass in the form — a dense mosaic of multicolored stones fitted a...
Pete Sierra is a Navajo silversmith whose name carries weight among collectors of Southwestern work, and this cobblestone cuff shows the reason. Across the top of a wide sterling band he’s set a mosaic of multicolored...
Some cuffs you wear; this one you read. Ronnie Glodove is known for his micro-inlay, and here he’s turned the whole surface of a thick sterling cuff into a night sky — multicolored stones set in miniature across a cel...
Turquoise is never just one color, and this cuff is built to prove it. A true tour de force of the stone, it gathers turquoise in a full range from green to blue — sourced from many different mines, each with its own ...
A sculptural sterling cuff in the modernist manner, and the engineering is the thing here: the way so many stones are cut and fitted into their respective positions across the curve is superb work, the kind that requi...
