An Evolution: 
The Showroom

At 212 Main Street, in a Hudson Valley hamlet, in a building that once turned out women's undergarments and, later, costume jewelry, we opened the next chapter of our jewelry studio. The 2,000 square foot showroom, designed with our dear friend, Ivy Nallo of her eponymous studio, expands the brand's nine year old Germantown, N.Y., home around a single premise: the distance between where the jewelry is made and where it is sold should nearly disappear.

We opened our first shop in 2017, surrounding jewelry with art, objects and clothing from friends and family - an environment meant to recall growing up in a house filled with art. As the business grew and its focus sharpened toward the jewelry itself, the new showroom became both a celebration of those first nine years and a fuller step into the studio's identity as a jewelry house.

I have always built my spaces the way an artist builds a studio: collected, lived-in, made - rather than merely decorated. My most recent iteration draws its model directly from two artists' homes. Donald Judd's homes and studios offered the clarity with which he lived among a collected palette of everyday materials. Elsa Peretti's home and studio offered a counterpoint: a life where drawing, collecting and gathering ran together, always overflowing. A third reference came from my own childhood, visiting my father's gallery on Saturdays and looking through the flat files at work not otherwise on view, a memory that became the central table at the heart of the showroom, where clients can open drawers and handle stones and pieces that would otherwise stay behind the scenes.

That idea, the studio as a way of living and working, shaped the architecture directly. The project began from the idea of the workshop, a place where making, conversation and commerce happen alongside one another. The program runs front to back: a showroom at the entry, a middle space for bespoke engagement ring and custom jewelry meetings, and a back office with a petite door leading into our production studio. A 230 square-foot pop-up space is reserved for rotating collaborations with other makers. The building's original beams were treated as sacrosanct, so rather than partition the space with conventional walls, we used drapery instead, letting rooms serve more than one function.

Ivy and I worked with the local artist Patrick Lazarus, who formulated a custom lime paint for each wall, tuned precisely to how the light hits at each angle. Ivy designed the front display case — the room's only locking case — drawing from a 1920s architectural cabinet seen at auction and fabricated by Primary Visual in Hudson. For the cashier table, Ivy took cues from a photograph of an elegantly gridded room, and Block Island carpenter and long time collaborator Chris Phelan built the piece. Custom sconces by our team, Sylvia Estes and Serena Hoffman, adapt a woven wire cuff bracelet design into lighting. Nate Hill contributed a folk-inspired standing mirror, and Kassandra Thatcher created lamps for the engagement space that incorporate crushed shells gathered from Montauk.

Threaded through it all is Block Island, my second creative territory alongside the Hudson Valley: its light, water and openness translate into a coastal palette of softened blues, weathered neutrals and stone, informed further by the work of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Edward Weston, Rachel Whiteread and Jack Pierson. Even the hardware carries the coastline through the room, with the pulls on the petite door and the fittings on the checkout counter made from Block Island beach stones.

Details collected over nine years anchor the new space alongside what's new: an antique coat hanger at the entry, curtains fabricated from organic gauze, and furnishings pulled from my own Block Island home. And, closing the loop from that first shop full of borrowed art, the walls now hold work by Claire Oswalt, Susan Paulsen, Robert Rauschenberg, Harry Callahan and Sarah Bird, with the showroom debuting a small series of jewelry boxes and displays created with Of Enso.

The goal was constant: to demystify luxury, inviting visitors to linger over tea with the same welcome extended to selecting a diamond, so that time spent in the store feels as valued as any transaction.

Photographed by Sarah Elliot, Chris Mottalini, and Miles & Miles.